Resident Evil: Face of the Coin
by sadbear
Summary: A black teenager wakes up in a zombie outbreak a Chinese female spy, and framed for a murder she did not commit. Both zombies and humans being her worst nightmares. Discover the truth or just survive? Events take place before Resident Evil 2.
1. Chapter 1 A Bizarre Beginning

Chapter 1 **~ A Bizarre Beginning**

He slowly opens his eyes and see a bloody wall right in front of him. Then, he realizes that the whole place is dark, save for the area around the window, which were lit by the moonlight. He stands up, feeling worse than the last hangover he had. As his head still rings, all he can remember was that he was hanging out with his homies during afternoon lunch, before he heard a loud noise and he saw a flash. Now, he sees the same placehe was before all around him, all in a chaotically horrifying contrast.

"This is too painful to be a dream..."

He looks around the place which should have been a school cafeteria. He sees more blood - on the table, the long benches, all over the floor.

"...How the...!?"

He crouches down and use his index finger and dip it into the nearest gore. He brings his finger as close to his nose as he can smell it. The typical iron-like aroma of it confirms his curiosity before he immediately wipes his finger on his shirt.

It was then that he notices two large buns on his chest. He begins to grab them and feel their texture. Getting the weird urges, he puts his hand underneath the dress he now notices he is wearing. More than the thought of him wearing a dress, he almost goes mad at the thought that he now has a pair of breasts.

"What in the name of all that's holy!?"

His scream is soon followed by a voice. A moan, to be exact. Soon, he hears more different voices coming out from the hallway. Footsteps, with a mix of the sound of wet stuff being dragged on the floor gradually grow louder in his ears.

The moans are anything BUT sexy. He stands there getting the chills. He begins to see one of them entering from the front door. His face was bloody and torn, he could see his teeth. One of his eyes is literally hanging out of its socket. From his abdomen, beneath his torn jacket, he can see intestines swinging to the rhythm of his pace. He has seen this before, in videogames and movies, and he knows right there and then that unless he forgets about his body and do something fast; he will be devoured by this man now known as a zombie.

Just as he tries to walk forward, he feels odd about his feet. He looks down and see them, covered in skin-tight, dark brown stockings and fit nicely inside a pair of red high-heels.

"Wha...?! What the FUCK happened to me!?"

The first zombie he is seeing now already had its rotten eyes set on him. It begins to walk towards him and making him stop figuring out his shocking discovery on himself.

He looks toward the door behind the counter. He knows the door would lead through the kitchen and to outer back of the building. He tries to run towards the door, with his movements damped down by the high-heels which he kicks off soon. Now barefooted, he jumps over the counter. His timing is flawed, as he trips his left foot on the edge and falls down, his head only several inches away from a knife held up by the messy mountain of plastic plates.

"Damned dress!?"

He stand up again. He sees more zombies coming from the hallway, with their desperate moans perhaps showing just how they're 'dying' for his warm flesh. He quickly picks up the knife and push the kitchen door open with his palm. As he runs, he can hear the moans grow louder, and his legs begin to shake a bit, as he sees some familiar faces while making his way out - familiar faces of which, some are already separated with their bodies, and many others looking gruesome from the torn flesh and oozing brain tissues; that kind old lady Ms. Barnes, the wanna-be rapper K-Fad, the (used to be)hot lesbian Jenna, his eternal enemy Mr. Reynolds the principal...

He releases the mixed emotions from the terrible sight he has seen so far to the back door. The blinking 'EXIT' sign never felt any brighter as he kicks the door open. The zombie from the hallway is fast approaching, but he immediately presses the lock button on the inside side of the door knob and shuts it from outside. The knocking on the door he hears soon after still makes him nervous, but he takes some time to take his breath.

He is now out of the building. Directly in front of him is the wall separating the school compound from outside, of which climbing it should be a piece of cake from all the 'training' he received while trying to skip school, but he can hear gunshots and more moans, the size of which he would expect to hear from more than a 30-man crowd. To his sides are walkways around the cafeteria complex, the one on his right-hand side connects to the classes building. As he distinguishes the choices, he hears a girl's cry for help from the direction of that building. He can also see several zombies 'patrolling' along the walkway. It is not enclosed, but he realizes full well that despite their slow movements, it is still very risky to try and run THROUGH the zombie crowd even in open spaces.

"That red liquid smells too real to be ketchup... And that rotten stench... And now I'm some CHICK in a red dress and high-heels in the middle of a friggin' zombie outbreak. And my buddies..." He speaks to himself, while finding it hard to believe any of the things he just spoke. His shaking knees almost made him collapse before he hears the knockings from the undead grow louder. "If I get out of this alive, I ain't watchin' anymore "...of The Dead" movies!!"

"Please!! Somebody!! Help me!!"

The scream gets more and more desperate, it feels as if it creeps into his heart and smothered some of the fear he is having from the situation. Grabbing the knife more firmly inside his right hand, he tries to run as fast as he can through the corridors -and the zombies that occasionally jerk their rigor-mortised hands toward him in attempt to grab him. 15 seconds later, which by then felt like the longest 15 seconds ever in his life, he makes it into the building, a battalion of the flesh-hungry undead following right behind him. Surprisingly, he sees only three more zombies on the first floor walkway.

He hears a scream from the same voice again. The way it echoed in the direction of the stairs right beside his position now must mean that she must be very close by the stairs as well. Wasting no more time, he gets up the ladder.

The moment he reaches the second floor, he sees a girl in a classroom right in front of him, cornered into a dead end by two obese zombies.

"God... Being obese ain't just harmful to your own health, these days..." He thinks to himself. Then again, he realizes that this is not the time to debate on healthy eating habits because the girl might be cornered into her life's end. A few milliseconds later, he gets into the classroom and towards the fat zombies, stopping at a distance just far enough from getting a surprise grab from one of them, which suddenly took a 180 degrees turn on him. Now, both zombies' attention are paid toward him.

"Hey, why... Why are YOU HERE!?" The girl said, pointing her finger at him.

"Saving your ass?!" He replies as he takes a few steps back from the two fat zombies slowly advancing on him.

"No...! NO!! I'M NOT GONNA BE SAVED BY A BITCH LIKE YOU!!"

"I almost got killed for getting here so you can at least SKIP THAT WORD!!" He begins to have a small regret, from the way the girl is treating him. Suddenly, he feels his left foot hitting something. He looks behind to see a semi-automatic handgun. Ignoring all thoughts on why a firearm is lying in a classroom, he immediately switches the knife into his left hand and grab the gun with his right hand. He fires the gun towards the two zombies: two rounds missed, three more into each of the zombies' head. After that, they both fell on their knees and fell into a (certain) death.

"Funny... this gun ain't that hard to use..." He talks to himself as he look at the gun. Then he notice that the girl is still there, sitting in a corner with her eyes dead set on him with all hatred.

"What do you intend to do!? Just shoot me like you shot Gene!"

Who's Gene? - He immediately wonders.

"You know... I almost peed in pants earlier, but I haven't gone crazy yet... I think. You sure you're OK?" Just as he ducks down and try to make some sense into her, he hears the moans again. He turns his head and see that the entire corridor is flocked with zombies. Two of them have already made their way, each into the front and back door. "Oh fuck..." A zombie siege, and a girl who probably has lost her mind. Is this the end?


	2. Chapter 2 Mistaken Identity

Chapter 2 **~ Mistaken Identity**

He opens the window slide to look down. Two zombies in a walkway that leads to a small opening in the brick wall. He figures that it's the best path he has.

More zombies are coming into the class. The disarranged chairs and tables obstructed their path, slowing them down, but he knows there's no time to waste.

"You want'cho ass eaten or you want outta here!?"

The girl keeps her silence. He becomes annoyed by this and about to jump through the window and leave her alone, but then he hears her scream. He sees one of the zombies lunge and lay on the ground with his hands both grabbing the girl's leg. She tries to kick him off but to no avail. Conscience takes him over and he throws his knife. It is stabbed into the zombie's upper head and he moans his last.

"Get up, damn it. GET UP!!" He pulls the girl by her wrist up and bring her to the window.

"Hey!? Let go of me!" The girl says in protest. "You want me to jump off here!?"

"FUCK YEAH!! OR WE'LL BOTH DIE!!" He points the gun at her head in angst. "Hurry up!!"

She then jumps from the window, again with a scream. He is about to be grabbed as well, by three lunging zombies before he manages to jump away. With his bare feet first, he lands on the grassy ground, right behind the girl. He takes her hand again and pull her up. One of the walkway zombies walk towards him and he fire the gun again. However, he only fired one shot to his chest before he notices that nothing happens anymore as he pulls the trigger. The zombie he shot earlier still advances on him.

"SHIT!" He cusses at the thought that the gun went out of ammunition. Still not giving up, he throws the gun at the zombie's head and run as fast as he can, pulling the girl who is now limping, during the distraction. Both of them manage to run past another zombie before he finally reaches the small opening.

When both of them reached the other side of the wall, both of them take some deep breaths from all the running. Suddenly light flashes at him and he hears a 'pumping' sound. He cannot see who it is for the surrounding is quite and the light is blinding, but what the person is holding is definitely a shotgun.

"Say something." It was a deep voice.

"Oh God, another human being! .GODI'mgoingcrazyPleasehelpme." The girl gabbled words like mad. Her tears begin to flow and she holds her head as if she has completely lost it.

"That was SOMETHING alright..." He mutters to yourself.

*****

"I've never killed anyone until today, and those are fucking zombies!!"

He tries to explain to the girl, whose name is actually Brenda. He, Brenda and the janitor Kirk Woods are now in the cabin, one of the two buildings in the janitor's area he crawled into earlier. The same opening which he came from earlier has already been closed off by a heavy steel table all three of them lifted together. Being safe for now, all of them are now sitting around a battery-powered fluorescent light cum clock. It reads 4: 37 AM.

"Don't lie to me! I saw you coming out of Gene's house earlier this morning before I found him dead!"

"OK, OK, STOP IT!!" Woods hit the cement floor hard with the stock of his shotgun. "Keep your voices down. This place is no fortress."

He begins to think to himself. Minutes before, he took a look at himself in the mirror on the cabin's wall. He knows that he is Shaun Kash, a male senior in Raccoon High of an African-American descent who is about to turn 18 next month. What he saw in his reflection however, is not his dark-skinned, 5' 12' moderately toned masculine body, but rather a slim one, quite curvy with breasts. His skin is now a pale, pinkish white and his almost bald head now is crowned with a neck-long hair, firmly combed slightly to the left, with parted bangs, one side almost covering his right eye. Driving him further mad is that he is not the only one seeing himself as this: Woods earlier addressed him as 'miss'. He begins to think that the crisis as impossible as this zombie outbreak might be connected to whatever that has happened to him. Despite all that, they are his least of worries now since Woods, who is holding a shotgun, does not show much trust in him as he does with Brenda. He knows that 'changed bodies' is not a good explanation to buy that.

"I REALLY don't know what happened here, but I never killed anyone, and I've never met this... 'Gene'. If I did, why would I go out of my way to save YOU?" He looks straight into Brenda's eyes, which she then turn away. After a brief silence, he decides to get some information from Woods. "Speaking of what happened, can you tell me?"

"Well..." He makes a sigh. "All I know was that I woke up late yesterday. I was going to the Science Club's mini-farm to do some cleaning when I heard a commotion. Then I saw a kid being eaten alive by a group of teachers. I went back here to call the police, but the line's dead, so I took out my shotgun and when I went back there, there were already over 40 them walking towards me. Since then, I've locked myself in here."

"So you don't know much, either... Great..."

_BANG!!! CRASHHHH!!!!!!!_

All of them stand up. In a small hole on the cupboard held against a window, Woods takes a peek.

"The bastards broke the gate and made their way in here!"

"What!? What are we gonna do!?" Brenda freaks out again. He is still standing there, thinking what he should do.

"Miss, now that I'm telling you this, it means that I trust you. Please don't make me regret it."

He feels awkward being called that again, but the zombies won't even stop to laugh at him, and so, he nods to Woods.

"In that blue crate, there's a 45."

"What's a '45'?!"

"A gun, you idiot!"

He immediately opens the crate. He sees a pair of small boots, which is perfect for him who has been barefooted from the start of this hell. He wears them immediately.

"What are you doing!? Get the gun!" Woods is already at the steel door. "I'm gonna lock this place out once we're outside to keep Brenda safe, so take ONLY what you need!"

"Got it!" Amidst the junk in the blue crate, he finds the following: a mix of green herbs, a handgun, two fully-loaded handgun magazines, a sealed box of .45 caliber ammunition that writes "30 bullets", a pack of seven shotgun shells, a wooden baseball bat and a Molotov cocktail with a lighter. He does not know how much rounds the gun holds in one magazine and how many zombies are coming or if they come from other sides. Time is running out and he only has a pair of hands with a small pocket.


	3. Chapter 3 'The Shady Assassin'

Chapter 3 **~ 'The Shady Assassin'**

As she takes a packet of herbs, handgun, a sealed box of .45 ammo and 2 full magazines for the handgun from the blue crate, she glimpses at Brenda. She can see the girl crouching on the floor with both her hands covering her ears, crying.

"Now..." Woods hands over a key to her while he presses a switch. "Open the door for me."

She jacks in the key into its hole and turns it. After a 'click' sound, confirming the door being unlocked, she holds the doorknob. "Ready?"

"On three."

"One, two..."

"Three!" As soon as she opens the door, Woods immediately fires his shotgun at a zombie standing just in front of the door, and walks out. She follows suit, and due to the lights around the cabin, she can see the surrounding area better: a fallen twin steel gate, held together by a bunch of chains, laying on the ground and now only serves as a welcoming carpet for over 20 man-eating monstrosities, as much as she can see through the illuminated area, and several more from his sides. She knows the place well: the janitor's area which used to be storage to keep raw ingredients for the cafeteria's use is surrounded by a brick wall. It is on the south-west end of the school compound. To her right is the classes building he came from earlier. Ahead of her is the administration building, parking lot and the main gate. She figures that the group of zombies attacking her now may have come from the administration building and may include some that lost their way from the classes building - which means that there may be more than she can see, and may be more than that which she can cover with her ammunition.

"I can't believe you didn't put anything at the front gate..." She locks the cabin's door back and put the key back into her pocket. Then she begins to aim her gun forward. Woods do the same with his shotgun.

"I know. But who would've thought they'd be able to shake the door down?"

"...Fucking good-for-nothing undead mothafuckas!!" She shoots her gun first, to three zombies to her right. One shot to each head. Meanwhile, Mr. Woods begin advancing forward and fires two rounds which took out five of them.

"Hey! You check the back!" Woods, still firing his shotgun, gives his order to her which she follows. She walks through the area fast but cautiously, always aiming the gun.

She returns to the front gate after clearing the sides of the cabin and the other building behind it after she fired 32 rounds to take out the wandering zombies. She used the extra two magazines and there are only four rounds left in her gun which she now knows has a capacity of 12.

"Dammit, where did the shells go!?"

She sees Woods searching frantically around his body. She also sees corpses lying on the ground around him, but a lot of zombies are still coming.

"You're out of ammo?!"

"No! I'm sure I had some more with me! Must've dropped somewhere!"

"WHAT!?" Three zombies are already in front of her, but she fires her gun to them before they could do anything. One shot missed and three more smashes their brains.

"Wait! There should be some left in the crate! Give me the key!"

"Key!?" Both of them retreat to the door. She searches her pocket for the key, but she cannot find it. "Damn!" She kneel down and take out everything she keeps in her pocket: The two empty magazines, the sealed box of .45 bullets and the mixed herbs but no key.

"Don't tell me you DROPPED IT!?"

"NO! I'M SURE I HAVE IT!!" As she says this, she sees several zombies approaching at her rapidly from a distance. Knowing that her gun is now empty, she presses the magazine release with one hand while tearing the seal of the .45 ammunition box with another, and refills the magazine that dropped from her gun and another one she took out. After keeping one of them back in her pocket, she uses another to reload her gun. She is about to get up when she notices Woods looking at her strangely. "What?!"

She immediately ignores him however. She continues to fend off all the approaching zombies for nearly a minute until she used up both of her magazines. There are eight more of them charging at her. That is when she see Woods besides her, blasting his shotgun five times towards the remaining undead.

"Fucked up... This place is fucked up..." She says with a sigh, after seeing the entire zombies lie on the ground. Then she ducks down with her head facing the ground and take a deep breath. "If you see anymore coming, just let me wait to die in the cabin..." She then remember the key she had lost. "Wait... your shotgun...! Where did you find the key!?"

"It's slipped into your empty mag." Both of them look at each other. Woods' eyes are still looking strangely at her.

"Now what did I do?"

"Funny that I was going to ask something similar... But first thing's first, we need to get out of here. These zombies were flocking the parking lot before they sniffed us out. It's only a matter of time before the others from other areas get here. We should go while it's not too crowded."

"With your shotgun, you could've blown your own way out earlier..."

"I don't shoot heads 9 out of 10 like you do, Miss Secret Agent..."

"...What did you just say...?"

*****

"What time is it?" She asks Woods.

"Half past seven."

After she, Mr. Woods and Brenda outran the rest of undead at the school and shut the front gate, all of them set out for the police station, located at 10 miles south-east. To her surprise, she encountered very few threats as she passed the industrial area, which is where most factories are located. Currently they have walked for an estimate of two miles.

Her heart is filled with anxiety. As she walks, she takes a look at her gun and thinks of her conversation with Woods, moments ago.

"What do you do for a living?" She was standing at the cabin door on the lookout when Woods asked her. She could see him putting supplies into his backpack from several boxes.

"I'm still in my Senior Year."

"In this school?" Mr. Woods turned his head at her for a while. "Never seen your face before. And what's with the alluring dress? It's too early for prom, if you're really a school kid."

Her heart started beating fast. With what she is and what she is wearing now, that answer was bound to cause suspicion. Still, she tried. "If I tell you that the school covered up Father Daniel's love for kiddie porn and simply fired him, would you believe me?" It was last week's hot topic, and everyone in the school was talking about it, but the look on his face soon after was almost a 'No'.

"The way you reloaded your gun in front of me at that time really amazed me. It was as if you were trained."

She instantly realized, that the whole time she was using the gun, it was so natural. She began to feel that she is supposed to know something, but could not make out what it is. Never the less, she tried to explain with anything that came to her mind. "Hey... I was desperate. Haven't you learned Biology? It's called 'adrenaline rush'."

"That's not how they teach you in Biology, bitch." Brenda interrupted. She looked at her and she turned away with a scowl on her face.

"Still, I did something to keep us alive, wiseass."

"Even if that's true..." Woods voiced out again. "That gun fires .45 ACP rounds. The recoil would've been annoying for beginners, but you hardly flinch in between shots. That's saying a lot for someone who claims she's still in high school. I don't deny how people can suddenly be good in desperate times but I can't help being curious."

There was a brief silence. Her mind wondered herself about what Woods said.

"Come to think of it, in this newspaper I read a few days ago, it said something about the murders of two high-ranking Raccoon University professors done professionally and is linked to a woman."

"I know about that too." Brenda turned to face Woods. "One of them was Gene's dad."

"Oh please..." She never liked reading newspapers (actually she never liked reading anything), but she remembered seeing a similar article in the front page. She also remembered the bits where investigators found that the murders were done in an organized way, and an overseas pharmaceutical company may be involved. Yet, she laughed. "Just because I'm a..." She shook her head in embarrassment before she continued, while both Brenda and Mr. Woods gave an odd look. "A woman... *sigh*... and I shoot all heads that want a bite of my ass, you assume I'm some shady assassin? Wow, I feel so honored… Might as well kill both of you now."

"Heh, I'll bet on my shotgun that you won't." Woods closed the top of his now full backpack. "In a situation like this, you'll need all the help you can get, whatever you real intentions may be."

The cold morning wind did not bother her in the slightest from her recalling of that conversation. Still looking at the gun, now she begin to wonder herself about how she wonderfully handled her gun, since she never used one until several hours ago. Feeling frustrated, she begins to try hard to remember exactly what happened before she woke up in the bloody cafeteria. Her frustration adds up when she fails to do so.

Being preoccupied with her thoughts, she does not realize that she is now very close to the city center, until she hears Woods say something.

"I thought I prepared myself, but damn... Is the whole city's kapish...?"

She feels the same way, seeing the damaged cars littered around the road. Some of them are in flames. Some of them crashed into buildings. Some are simply turned upside down. Bodies covered in blood littered inside the cars, over them and under. More bodies are on each side of the road, or just limbs, with red-stained, broken white bones sticking out in between flesh and arteries and veins. Looking at the unimaginable situation in front of her, she unintentionally steps on something soft and moist, which she soon discovers as a baby's head, with all cuteness gone inside the blood-stained face and minced brain tissues. The rotten smell from them makes its way into her nostrils, which she soon covers with her left hand. The buildings which she used to see painted in clean white, pink, blue, scribbled with graffiti or simply left showing the bricks, now all have splashes of blood, dry and fresh, small and big, as much and far as she can see through several pillars of smoke from various distances. The entities responsible for all this are still there: through the broken windows and amidst the disarranged items, she sees them standing still in some of the shops and the path ahead. Some are in the middle of enjoying their 'breakfast'.

Her shaking legs fail to disturb her in her shocked trance. For the first time in her life, and many others -the majority of them are probably already dead- she is experiencing a large scale zombie outbreak.

"Hang in there." She hears Woods talking to Brenda, who is puking out. Then he and she look into each other for a moment. "You were trash-talking happily at school. Why do you have to be quiet now?"

"I was busy keeping myself alive, y'know?" She looks down, at her boots. The blood from the baby's head still looks bright red. "Now that I'm taking a good look at this situation..."

"Hmph... now you act all fragile and soft."

"Hey, I'm a victim too!"

She clenches her left fist. Woods ignores her however, and keeps walking ahead, holding Brenda's shoulders. Now officially angry, she kicks a wrecked car's door nearby. Then she notices a crowbar, stuck into the mirror, which she then takes and smashes the mirror, breaking it further.

"If you have the energy to get pissed off, you should reserve that for our enemies ahead." Woods with Brenda were already 50 feet away from her when he says it. She is still unsatisfied, but she knows he is right, so she catches up with them. All of them continue to walk along the road, eliminating several zombies that come their way, before she sees a bunch of cars obstructing her from going further. "Hmm... guess we'll have to take the long way."

She knows what Woods mean. The long way will be the path through Grant Street, to her left. While she is thinking of how far the long way is, she notices that someone is looking at her from one of the alleyways between the buildings to her right. She can see her leaning her back on the wall the opposite of her, and a gun in her hand. It was not long before she realize that this woman looks just like her now.

"HEY YOU!!" She hollers at the disturbing replica of herself, but instead of coming out, the replica disappears into the side of the building.

"What's the matter." Woods, and Brenda both look at her.

"Didn't 'cha see that chick!? She looks just like me!!"

"What...?"

"Between Shaven-Elephant and Dike! There's this chick peeking out!!"

Woods looks at place she described for a moment, but turns back at her with suspicion. "You're not trying to slow us down from the police station, are you? And with a weird excuse at that."

"I'm telling you just the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the fucking truth!! I saw her!!" Woods keeps walking forward however, ignoring what she has to say. She is not about to give up yet. "If ya ain't comin' with me, I'mma get her myself."

"If that's how you want to be..." Woods turns and aims his shotgun towards her. "Give back my .45 and the bullets."

"WHOA!! DON'T POINT THAT THING AT ME!!"

"Sorry miss... whoever you are, but that gun IS mine. If you won't co-operate with me, don't you think it's a good waste of MY resources? Besides, you're not completely defenseless without the gun now that you have that crowbar."

"GOD FUCKING DAMN IT, MAN!!" She never thought it could get any worse. Going off to chase an armed woman alone with just a crowbar in the middle of a zombie infested town is as dangerous as it gets. However, it is obvious to her now that Woods' trust in her is so low, she might probably die being shot at for a misunderstood move sooner or later, and she also has a strong feeling that the woman has all the answers she seeks to clear her name.


	4. Chapter 4 Conscience

Chapter 4 **~ Conscience**

"Fine, fine! I'll still tag along. Now getcho' boomstick off me!" She swings her right arm, feeling completely useless and fed up. "But I ain't dreaming, or high, or making stuff up. I really saw her, with a gun."

"A wrong place at the wrong time to meet your long lost twin, eh?" Woods says with a laugh, which further angers her, but she is already too tired to talk back.

She knows she will not be completely lost, however. The fact that she saw that 'twin' of hers must prove that indeed, she is not dreaming, or high, or making stuff up. Perhaps the two murders were really committed by her, and by some twisted, sickening way, she tries to frame this struggling man-turned-woman for her crimes by turning the body identical to hers. Perhaps, she will find several clues from the police, if they will not arrest her first.

She is only several meters from the junction into Grant Street when she hears Brenda mumbling something.

"Woods, sorry but... I'm hungry." It is a weak voice. She can see the girl holding her stomach.

"...Now that you mentioned it, so am I."

As do the woman. She has been sharing a couple of drinks from Woods' flask, but she has never eaten anything since she woke up, or perhaps more accurately, since yesterday afternoon, and she did not see any food either when Woods were storing things in his backpack. Just then, she realizes that a grocery store is not far away from her left. Brenda and Woods realize it too, and all of them look at each other.

"You go." Mr. Woods mentions the order to her before she can say anything.

"You want me to go in there, by myself!?"

"The store doesn't seem like there are any zombies in there." As Woods point to the store, she takes a look at it: The lights are still on. Several shelves and two of the three drinks chiller are on the floor, but a door at the furthest back is closed, there is not a splat of blood visible, and the glass entrance is wide open. "Besides, someone's gotta cover the outside while you're in."

"Let me come with you." Brenda is already stepping towards her, but Woods quickly get hold of former's shoulders.

"No." He repeats it five times. "She can go in herself."

"Sheeesh... and all she ever did was trembling in fear." She mumbles to herself. There's no denying that they need the food. Then it occurred to her that she can take more from this store with two people. There is no guarantee that she will not have to take long detours anyway, and the police station is still over 6 miles apart. However, the setting of the store is still too suspiciously easy, and she will have to defend someone else in addition to herself if anything happens. Sure, she can give the blonde girl the crowbar, and she cannot be too stupid to not be able to swing it in times of need, but the risks involved makes the woman take some time thinking before she finally speak again. "I don't like babysitting but... Will you not chicken out later?"

She sees Brenda being hesitant for a moment, but it seems the way she asked intimidates her.

"I... I won't chicken out! Just give me a weapon!"

"Hey, you're not serious?" Woods looks at her. She only sighs.

"With her, I can loot more stuff. Besides, God knows just how long we will take to get to the station."

"As long as you're willing to be responsible."

"I'm NOT really willing though..."

She decides that Brenda can come along, and that she needs a weapon. Since the teenage girl is only starting to learn to defend herself, the woman give her the weapon with the longest range: handgun. The woman took some time to teach her about magazine release, the safety, and how to properly hold the gun and aim.

With Woods already aiming his shotgun around, she and Brenda head into the grocery store. Slowly and cautious, she makes her step with her grip on the crowbar tight. Brenda imitates her movement, as she shakily looks behind and to her sides. The woman moves to the cashier's counter to see if anything is hiding beyond it. She praises the Lord for seeing nothing, and then took two large plastic bags. After that, both of them move to the door at the back. Little by little, she tries to push the knob, but she soon finds out that it is probably locked.

"O.K., it's clear." She releases a sigh of relief. Then she turns to Brenda and give her a plastic bag. "Let's go grab our food. Just don't take too much or it will slow you down."

"I know, I know."

Yet, she herself could not resist when she sees the abundance of her favorite Kit-Kat on the shelf closest to her. Her plastic bag is already over a half full with them when she moves on to other shelves, already chewing a block of the candy. When she sees the book shelf, her attention is piqued on an opened newspaper slipped in the 'today' glass pocket.

_ZOMBIES ON THE VERGE OF DESTROYING THE CITY_

_24 Sept. - After completely obliterating housing areas near the Arklay Mountains, waves of zombies are now moving in towards the city. Police officials said that the three main roads which used to be the main entrances to the town are now completely teeming with them. "There is no real way out. Anyone who tries to, will face extreme danger from the zombies and the infection." Official spokesperson for RPD, Norman Chavkoski confirmed in an emergency press conference at midnight. "The police are doing all we can to overcome this. In the mean time, we advice all citizens to stay in your homes, lock all doors, and constantly tune in the Emergency Broadcast Station for any further orders._

_Answering the rumors that the infection is spread by wounds caused by the zombies, Chavkoski said, "There is no confirmation whatsoever about the nature of this outbreak. We pledge the citizens not to take matters into your own hands and stay calm."_

Brenda's tap on her shoulder brings you back. "You're looking at porn? And in times like this?"

"...the hell? 'Course not!" She then realizes that in her line of view, behind the glass pocket, several pornographic magazines are being displayed. The attractive poses of the models on the pictures displayed on the front page of one of the magazines however, cause her to take it anyway.

"Yeah, SURE..." After taking several cans of drinks, she walks in the middle of fallen glass ashtrays towards the exit, with Brenda following her. When Brenda also notices the article she just read, she stops and looks at it. The woman is already at the entrance when she sees the girl do it, several shelves in front of you.

"C'mon, Brenda. We can't be in here too long."

Brenda begins to walk again, but her head is still facing the article. Careless, she trips and falls on her knees. The plastic bag she is carrying falls as well and hits one of the glass ashtrays, producing a loud noise as it breaks.

"Damn..." The woman is going to help her, but then, she sees the back door open in force to your side, and the thing that does it is a zombie. Its looks are unlike any she has encountered before. The skin on its head is bright red, and she notices the presence of several prolonged claws on both of its hands. Just before the woman runs towards her to help and tell her to shoot, she become shocked for a while at the rapid pace of which this zombie is moving towards Brenda.

"KYAAAA!!!" Brenda screams, also shocked by the oncoming unusual zombie. As she clumsily tries to get up, she fires two shots from the handgun, of which she sees makes a hole in the zombie's arm and chest. Still, it did not budge one bit. Instead, it gets to claw Brenda's hands, causing her to drop the gun, before it proceeds to bite her right arm. "NO! NO! STOP IT! NOOO!!"

In a flash, the woman drops her plastic bag, run towards Brenda and slides down with her knees to take the gun and shoot the zombie's head. It lets Brenda go as its head is thrown backwards, but it still tries to re-grab Brenda. That is when she shows up between them and fires another round from the ground. However, when she already fired her last round, and its brains now half gone, it still tries to approach towards her. Desperate. she lunges the crowbar in her left hand between its maggot-filled eyes. Its defeat is confirmed when she takes out the crowbar and see it fall.

"It... hurts..." Brenda's voice was slow, but shaky and makes the woman feel her pain. The bunch of zombies she then sees coming out of from the back door forces her to ignore that feeling for now.

"C'mon, let's hurry!" She puts the handgun inside the plastic so she can use your right hand to hold Brenda's and pull her up, while using the other hand to simultaneously carry both the crowbar and Brenda's plastic bag. When both of them stand up, she hears Mr. Woods saying out loud.

"Girls! We have a problem here!"

"...Now what...!" Both of them head to the entrance. She pick up her plastic bag she left earlier with the crowbar. She look behind her to see if Brenda is close to her. While doing so, she can see the girl holding her arm, with blood seeping out of her fingers.

"Look around us..." Woods are completely absorbed in tension when she finally gets to him. Around them now are seven of what used to be dogs. Their exposed flesh and bones are no less sickening than the zombies she has fought.

"...Since when does Raccoon have this much Rottweilers...?" With Brenda between Woods and her, the woman takes the gun again and switches the empty magazine with her last full clip and aim her gun at another bunch of dogs as she says it. Their growls get more intense as they inch closer to her.

"I wonder myself..."

Seconds after he said that, Woods blasts his shotgun to knock down two dogs, one of them immediately killed. A dog jumps at her, but she managed to feed it one bullet to bring it down and kill it. Then she fires another round at the dog Woods failed to kill, which gives all of them an opening to run away from the dogs group.

"That way!" She yells. Woods and Brenda does not waste one second and runs ahead into Grant Street, with her following behind. She fires the remaining 10 bullets to the dogs chasing her as she runs, of which only three of them hit two of the dogs, killing one of them while pushing another back. Suddenly she sees five more dogs coming out of the buildings along the street, immediately joining the group that chases her.

"Damn! I'M OUT!"

"Your gun's out?!"

Woods who must have figure out that the dogs are too fast for her to outrun, turns towards the pack of dogs and fires his shotgun to push back three of them, but neither is killed. In the midst of the urgent situation, she sees a bloody sawed-off shotgun several meters besides her. Thinking that this might be God-send, she quickly runs to pick up the shotgun and pull the trigger towards two dogs jumping to attack her. The recoil, the jet from the barrel and the dogs being pushed away lying in their own pool of blood assures her that there are bullets left.

"You want my Kit-Kats so badly huh!?" Getting a boost of spiritual energy, she proceeds towards the pack of zombified dogs as she fires the shotgun, and Woods fires his. "Have a break in hell!" The sight of the dogs being pushed back with her shotgun blasts never felt better, now that she is pressing them back. By the time all the dogs are made certain to have died, she takes a deep breath with a sense of accomplishment. "Phew...!"

"AHHH!" Brenda's horrified scream interrupts her in her moment of glory. Absorbed by shooting the dogs, neither of the two realized that both of them actually moved away from Brenda, which is now over 100 feet away, pinned down to the side of a car, and is fighting for her life against a zombie similar to the one the woman encountered in the grocery store.

"Oh... SHIT!!!" As she runs towards her, the woman can see her desperately trying to keep the zombie's mouth off her as she holds both of the zombie's wrists, with several of the zombie's attempt being so close to her neck before she could push him away. The woman try to get as close as she can towards them and fire the shotgun in an angle which will not harm Brenda, while Woods frantically searches around his body for shells to reload his now empty shotgun.

Brenda does not know how it happens, and she does not care, but somehow she manages to kick the zombie and pushes him back. In the several seconds of distraction it provided, she feels a gun underneath the car. Shaken but not yet ready to die, she screams and pulls trigger like mad towards the red-headed claw zombie. The woman hear three shots and no more, and then see him fall, with half of his head gone.

When the woman gets to her, she still does not stop screaming and pulling the trigger of the then empty gun, which she sees as a revolver.

"Brenda... BRENDA. CALM DOWN!" The woman try to hold the gun by the barrel, but its intense heat makes her pull her hand back in reflex. "PUT THE GUN DOWN! THE FUCKER'S DEAD!" Brenda's grip on the gun becomes loose, and it falls from her hands, but she is still screaming, with her hands still acting like she is shooting. The woman hold her shoulders and shake her. "CALM. THE FUCK. DOWN!! HE'S DEAD!!"

Brenda collapses to her chest. She cries hard as the woman holds her, rubbing her head. The woman looks around to make sure no danger is standing close, and then she see Woods get to you. "It's alright, babe. It's alright... you did well." With her compliments however, Brenda still cries hard, after almost losing her life.

*****

"She got bitten?" Woods gets frozen in his movement as he opens his backpack to find his first aid kit. All of them are now inside an empty car, which is considerably in a good shape. It was a strange find in Grant Street, and it is not the best shelter in the world, but they have to take a short break to eat and tend to Brenda's injury. Woods is sitting at the front, while both the woman and Brenda are at the back.

"In the grocery store." With a Kit-Kat in your mouth, the woman checks her sawed-off shotgun. No more shells inside. Brenda remains quiet, while occasionally looking at the wound on her right arm. "Like the one Brenda shot just now, it was weird."

"Yeah. I notice the claws." Woods is still not moving to search his backpack. His eye is looking at his shotgun at the dashboard.

"Can these zombies mutate or somethin'? Like those in X-Men? I mean, the sucka's ain't no Wolverine but... he survived six headshots with the .45."

"..."

"What's wrong? Hey, where's the medkit?"

In a blink of an eye, Woods takes his shotgun and aims it at Brenda. It startled the woman.

"Whoa, whoa!! You can't be testing your aiming skills at Brenda!!"

"She's bitten." Woods say it with a calm voice. "It's only a matter of time before she becomes one of them." The coldness of his words does not break Brenda's silence.

"Now, now. Hold on a sec'! What makes you think that?!" You hold Woods' shotgun barrel. "How do you know it's the bites!?"

"You don't need a biologist to confirm that. This is how it spreads so fast." Woods tries to move his shotgun in motions that will shake off the woman's hand from the barrel, but she keeps her grip. "We've seen this in novels and movies before."

"Fuck novels and movies! This is a real zombie outbreak! We don't know how it really infects!" You adjust your position to directly look into his eyes. "It can be through anything! Hell, it could be airborne, and all of us might have breathed plenty of it in already. Does that mean we all have to kill ourselves!?"

"...Sure takes less ammo to do it now."

"Then I'd like to see you blow your own head off, first!"

Woods is out of words. However, he remains in the aiming stance for a while he finally drops it down.

"Just give me the medkit, will you?!" When Woods hands it to her, she takes it forcefully in protest to his attitude. "We all have the right to live our lives until the very last second, ESPECIALLY in times when they can be taken away so easily from you."

"What if she turns?"

"Then I'll kill her." Woods begins to stay quiet for the entire time all of them are in the car. "I'm the shady assassin, remember?" Meanwhile, the woman cleans up Brenda's wound and patch it up with all the items she can use in the first aid kit. She notices Brenda staring at her face as she holds her arm to treat it. The woman knows Brenda has read the same article she read in the store, and the girl is probably thinking that the rumors may be true. The woman want to try to rid her of her worries, but with what she just said to Mr. Woods, her mouth feels locked up.

"...one... stenin... this..." Suddenly, static noise of which all of them can hear someone talking blares throught the car's stereo she did not realize is on. "...many more survi... warehouse... Prankster & Gamb... starv... Please hel... ammo..."

"I think he said 'warehouse at Prankster and Gamble'. That's not so far away from here, right?" She knows the place because she used to do part-time job there. Specifically, it is behind Prankster and Gamble, several blocks away to the east. It happens to be along the route they are supposed to take to the station too. "The guy's got a radio. The cops oughtta heard this, so we should just go there and wait!"

"OK..." Woods responds to the woman as if he is in no mood to talk. Brenda still keeps quiet. Never the less, both of them move out of the car along with her, agreeing to her plan. She search inside the car again, and its back for any other things she may have left behind. Then she discovers a waist pouch, a belt about four feet long, 17 .45 cartridges, a Universal Tactical Light and nine shotgun shells. She immediately loads five shotgun shells into her sawed-off shotgun and reload the .45 and an extra clip. After she ties the belt to the gun and hang it around her body, and slide the Light on her .45, she finally sets out.

She has only made several steps when all of them notice a flare being shot to the sky from the roof of the church to the north. She sees three more of them, sparkling red in color. It seems someone is signaling for help. Unlike the path to the warehouse, which forces them to go through tight alleyways, the path to the church is wider. The woman's ammunition is not too big in supply anyway, Mr. Woods seem to be running out of his shells, and she can try to get as much people as she can before going to the warehouse. The only question left is, will it be any easier inside?


	5. Chapter 5: The Good, Bad and The Mutated

Chapter 5: **The Good, The Bad and The Mutated**

"...Change of plans."

Both Brenda and Woods look at the woman.

"Let's go to the church, first. We pick up any survivors left there and take them along with us to the warehouse."

"Wait a minute." Woods, who notices that he is standing close to Brenda, moves away from her before he continues. "I don't think we should add any further detours. We should just head to the warehouse, NOW."

"Why should we? The road ahead of us looks clean enough to me."

"Yeah, but what about the inside?"

The woman becomes hesitant for a moment, but she is still adamant about going to the church. "Well, obviously someone's still alive in there, so I doubt there's too much shit going on. Besides, you said it yourself when we're still at the school, that I need 'as much help as we can get'. That doesn't just apply to ME, right?"

"All right, all right..." He agrees, while clicking his tongue. "I just hope that we won't lose our own lives while trying to save others'."

While all of them are walking, Brenda taps the woman's left shoulder.

"S'up?" She turns behind to look at the girl while still moving forward.

"I um..."

"Huh...?"

"Nevermind. Forget it."

"...the hell?"

The traffic light, which suddenly turns red as all of them are going to cross the messy road to get to the church at the other side feels both like a welcoming gesture and a kind of deja vu. From there, she can already see stacks of cabinets and long benches clumsily put against the main gate. When she finally reaches the gate, she can see that it is locked by chains tied with a padlock.

BANG!!!

It is a loud noise, like gunfire. All of them hurry up, with hands over theirr heads to find cover behind wall.

"Sniper?!" Woods cocks his shotgun.

"SHIT!! Can't they tell between zombies and humans!?" She hits the ground with the crowbar in frustration. Then, she screams out loud to make sure whoever fired towards her will hear. "DON'T SHOOT US DAMN IT!! WE'RE NOT ZOMBIES!!

She waits for over ten seconds but no response.

"DO YA THINK ZOMBIES CAN SAY 'FUCK YOU'!?"

"OK! OK! I GET IT ALREADY!" She hears a faint response. With that, slowly, all of themstep back towards the front gate. Through the beautifully decorated bars, she can see a man holding a rifle, standing near the edge of the church's roof.

"SURE TOOK YOU LONG ENOUGH!!" She waves. "WE SAW THE FLARES!!"

"WAIT A MINUTE! I'M COMING DOWN!"

The cabinets and long benches are in her way of vision, but she can hear the shrieking sound of the main door being opened and closed, some time later. Then she hears muddy footsteps, and a rope shows up from the other side of the wall.

"Can't find a ladder, so this will have to do."

She asks Brenda to go first. The girl shows some difficulty climbing the wall, about ten feet high, which prompts the woman to help her by pushing her up. When she finally gets past it, the woman and Woods look at each other.

"Go on." She tells Woods, but he responds with a sigh.

"...I can't!"

"Yeah... that's what you get when Big Mac is the only thing you eat everyday." She said it with a low voice, mocking Woods' overweight body, which he hears. He did not fight back however. She decides to go first with his backpack. When she makes it past the wall, she asks Woods to still try getting inside through the rope, with her, Brenda and the man pulling it. He is really heavy, but soon after, all of them are now within the church compound.

"Sorry about earlier. I thought I'll never see a human being again." The man smiles at you as he scratches his head. "I'm Dean Jaeger."

"...Just call me Kash." The woman shake hands with him, with both Brenda and Woods looking at you.

"I can't believe I didn't ask your name the whole time we're together... Oh, and I'm Kirk Woods."

"...I'm Brenda Falkland."

Just as Dean is going to shake hands with Woods, the woman hears loud flapping sound. All of them stand still for a few seconds before she can see large shadows move across the compound. When she looks up, she becomes shocked to see, one very large bird, over 40 feet wide. Its black wings, which make up much of its width, seem to have sharp-looking, thin, bloody pieces of bones at both ends. Its head and body are littered with open wounds and pieces of skin sticking out. Its beak is split in two, and tentacles can be seen coming out from it. Its talons look big enough to grab an adult human.

"Where the fuck did it...? That's one hell of a big bird..." The woman almost lose grip of her handgun at its hideously threatening size and rotten appearance.

"Yeah... and it doesn't look friendly. Hurry! Into the church!!" Dean orders, and leads their way to the large main door at the front. When all of them get there, Dean tries to open the door, but after he only manages to open it slightly, it will not move anymore. "DAMN! WHY DOES IT HAVE TO BE JAMMED NOW!?"

"WHAT!?" The big hideous bird above them is still circling around. "Ain't there any backdoors or somethin'?!"

"I locked all the other doors from inside!!" Dean still tries, but it does not seem to budge. All of them then try to help him, but then the woman hears a loud shriek, and she looks behind her to see that the bird is charging to her side and is turning towards their direction with its talons.

"GET DOWN!!"

All of them crouch down immediately to her warning. The bird's sharp 'feathers' clashes with the church's wall and scratches the door, peeling off bits of wood which falls on the woman's head. The rotten stench it leaves behind as it flies back into the air makes her realize that this is not just a large-sized bird. It's a zombiefied bird, and she needs to do something to fend it off while the door is being opened, before someone gets killed, but are their weapons and their ammunitions adequate? She can also distract it to buy time to open the door, and the church compound is wide enough for the job, but how long can she continue running around and evade it before she gets tired?

"At this rate, he'll probably eat us all before we can open this door." She let her hands off the door's edge and turns around. "We should just shoot the fuck outta Big Bird."

"Heroes die real soon, you know!?" Dean and the others are still trying hard to open the door. The woman looks at him, with what he just called her bothering her. "We can open this door if we try some more!!"

She keeps her eyes on the bird. It is now hovering over the airspace of the church's front. "We'll never open the door in time! That thing will keep on attacking us!"

"...For once, I agree with her." Woods lets go of the door as well. "C'mon!!"

Both of them get in the middle of the church's front. The woman fires her handgun first, with the intention of hitting its head, but she cannot be sure if it hits the bird. It does not even flinch.

"Damn bird just won't sit still!!"

After hovering for a while, it flies past the front gate. That is when the woman sees the bird ascending towards her fast. Its talons are positioned diagonally downwards toward her. Woods, who also sees this, sprints away to the side.

"HO-LY...!" She rolls quickly opposite of Woods' direction, evading its talon. In the process, she can feel the talon hitting one side of her boots, and it trembles her to know just how close her evasion was. As she is on her knees, she looks at the bird again. It goes back into the air and flies around. "Fucking bird is really pissing me off!!"

She stands up again. She fires her gun several times more towards the bird. She does not know which part of the bird she had hit -if any of the shots hit at all- but one of them seems to have hit the bird's right eye. It shrieks several times in pain, and its flight path becomes zigzags for a moment. Then it goes towards the back of the building, and disappears from her view.

"Nice shooting, as always." Woods compliments the woman while he is still sitting on the ground, probably shocked by the bird's last attempt to grab them. "That probably scared it."

She is neither pleased nor agreeing to him. The shrieking of the bird and its flapping is still audible to her. She senses that something wrong is shaping up. The feeling is so intense; she can feel her face and body drenched in sweat, amidst the dirt and sand that stuck to her skin from her rolling earlier. Noticing that her gun is out of ammunition, she switches the empty magazine with another one in her pouch, which only has five rounds left.

"Hey! If you're done, come back here and help us out!" Dean shouts to the woman. She only looks back at him, while fighting the impulsive change within her.

"Give me a few minutes." Woods crouches down and catches a few deep breaths.

"You'll fail again." It is a voice that neither of them spoke. The woman looks at Woods, and then towards Dean and Brenda who are still trying to open the door, but she could not determine its source. Its striking similarity to the voice of the body she is in now baffles her so much that she do not notice Dean screaming at her for her help. Her breathing becomes accelerated, and the sweating becomes more intense. It is a feeling of fear unlike any she has experienced since she woke up in the cafeteria, and her mind is almost going blank from it.

It is during this time, that she suddenly hears a burst-like noise coming in the direction of Woods. It is the bird again, who must have flown from the side of the church, and it is now coming after him in full speed.

"BEHIND YOU!!" It is already too late when she try to warn him. The bird got to him first, grabbing Woods by its talon on his shoulders from behind. Then it continues to fly back into the air along with him. Woods' scream echoes throughout the area as he faces the extreme probability of dying.

Yet, he is quick enough. Still holding the shotgun, he ignores the pain on his shoulders and fires it just under the bird's head. Stunned, the bird lets go of him, while they are over three stories high. When Woods falls back to the ground, he lands with his feet first. When the woman run towards him to try to help him, she sees him lying on his back, in the pool of his own blood. The gore continues to expand as blood flows out from the narrow wounds on both sides of his shoulders. Unable to take her eyes off the gore, her heartbeat increases. She stands there, as if in a trance. Then she feels her mind going completely blank, and the world becoming dark.

*****

The woman opens her eyes slowly. It is all blurry in the beginning. Then she can see it clearly: a beautiful chandelier. Shortly after, the shine from it makes her look realizes now that she is lying on a long bench. She wakes up to sit on it, and see the altar.

"White Whoopi's awake." She recognizes the voice as Dean's. She looks towards the bench's rear to see him, wrapping his arms, standing beside Brenda who is patching up Mr. Woods, now lying on the floor. Surrounding them are disarranged tables, chairs, and lockers. As she stares at them, she feels slight dizziness.

"...Wha... What happened...? We were shooting at the bird, and then it got Woods..." She holds her head and look down, trying to figure out what was going on. Dean walks towards her.

"If you're trying to be some kind of wise-cracking hero, you sure succeeded a few hours ago. I should have known by your dress..."

"TELL ME WHAT HAPPENED!!"

"...Sheesh... Do you want me to boost your ego or something...?" Dean scratches his cheek before moving on. "You were fighting that bird. Then the bird caught Woods, but he shot it and the bird dropped him down. After that, you took the Molotov cocktail from his backpack, and when the bird charged at you, you threw the Cocktail at it and stylishly fired your shotgun, effectively burning down Big Bird before you passed out. There, satisfied?"

Molotov Cocktail? Threw at the bird? The woman cannot remember any of the details after seeing Woods fall. It adds to her confusion so much that her frustration reaches its peak. Dean bends his back slightly to examine her closer upon seeing her weird reaction.

"You alright, Kash?"

"...Where's the toilet around here?" The woman does not feel like answering his question. Dean gazes at her for a few seconds.

"Go there..." He points to a passageway to the right of the entrance. "Then turn right. It's at the end."

Still holding her head, she stands up and quickly walk towards the way Dean showed, with him and Brenda keeping their eyes on the woman until she disappears at the right turn.

Opening the water tap and washing her face with the cold water is the first thing she does once she gets into the toilet. Then she looks into her reflection, at her face. She feels the water, but the face in that mirror is not hers, and neither is the dress-wearing body. She thought the water will cool her down, but those facts make her so angry, she punches the mirror. Her bleeding right hand stays where it hits for a moment before she drops it back into the basin.

"Punching the mirror won't change who you are." It is the same voice again, but this time, she is sure someone said it. She turns to her left to see that person. It is the woman she saw before she went to Grant Street: The woman who has the same face, voice, body and dress as she is now. "By the way, shouldn't that hurt?"

"That's none of your fucking concern. You were following me?"

"Let's just say that I will be where ever you will be."

The answer annoys her. With all the incidents she went through before, she becomes more and more angry at the sight of this mysterious figure, but the gun in this figure's hand and the absence of hers forces her to stay calm.

"It's amazing how human mind would adapt to crises and make us able to do things we never thought possible." She walks closer to the woman, but still not close enough for the figure to try to grab her gun away from her. "Or in your case, should I say it's thanks to MY skills...?"

"...I don't know who the fuck you are, or what the fuck you're trying to do, and I don't give a fuck. I want answers. To everything. About what happened to me. About the murders. And I want it NOW."

"My, my..." She grins. "It's all within you, hiding in your mind until the time comes... Until you are willing to accept your fate."

"You know... this really isn't the right time, place or the person for you to go Yoda with."

"Fight all you want, but you can never deny your fate." She begins to walk past the woman. "You'll see me again."

Just after she disappears behind the door, the woman run to chase her. When she is out, opposite of the toilet to her right, there is another door, open. She goes through, to walk into a room with several lockers and an open window. She goes to the window and sticks her head out to look around. All she can see are the grassy land, the wall that separates the church with outside, and the thick dark clouds on the afternoon sky, looming over Raccoon city.

"...Fucking Copperfield bitch!!!" She slams the wall with her palm in frustration. Then she releases a sigh and close the window.

"...Kash...?" The woman sees Brenda at the door. Both of them stare into each others' eyes for a moment. "...What just happened? I was going to the toilet. Then I saw you running out into this room..."

"Nothing." She feels that telling anyone about the encounter will not do anything but raise people's suspicion about her sanity. She is suspicious of her own sanity now, but it is in her instinct that she will have to deal with it herself. "Nothing... I was just... Nothing."


	6. Chapter 6: Darker Side of The Truth I

Chapter 6: **Darker Side of The Truth part I**

"So, this is what I have left for you."

Dean points at the items he placed on the altar: A Beretta M92F(M9) chambered for 9mm bullets and fully loaded with 15 of them, three fully loaded magazines for M9, two boxes of spare 9mm ammunition with '15 cartridges' written on each, 12 buckshot shotgun shells, two slug shells, two cases of 12 .38 Special cartridges and 21 .45 cartridges.

"'For us'?"

Brenda asks Dean while Kash is looking at Woods, sleeping at one of the few long benches remaining there. No longer in the red dress, but now a black long-sleeve t-shirt and khaki pants she took from the locker room, Kash takes hold of the M9 and looked around it. She tries to put it in the holster of the shoulder strap Dean gave her.

"Yeah. I used up a lot of ammo I got from the station just to defend this place. Just consider yourself lucky I have some to give you."

"So, you're a cop?"

"Yup." He takes out a badge and shows it to Brenda. Kash can see 'Detective' written on the beautifully decorated emblem.

"Were you alone, here?" Kash's out-of-topic question as she puts the gun back on the altar makes both Dean and Brenda stare at her.

"Well, strictly speaking, I wasn't. I had to dispatch quite a lot." She know he means the zombies and other freaks. "Fortunately, the wealth that Umbrella brought to this town made people forgot about God, so not as many people took shelter in here as you'd think there'd be. If I had realized sooner that no chopper's coming to pick us up and didn't light up the flares, I wouldn't have to worry about that Big Bird as well."

His answer raises more questions in Kash's head about the woman she encountered in the toilet, but she decides to just stop thinking.

"Maybe that bird attacked any choppers that might have noticed?" Brenda suggests which Dean nods to.

"Could be. But if that's true, we won't be seeing any chopper anytime soon. The flares are out anyway."

Kash knows the brand Umbrella well. For as long as she can remember, Umbrella Incorporated has been dominating the big signs all over the city. Known as the rich pharmaceutical company that brought progress to this otherwise remote, boring town, everyone clung to them as some sort of salvation, at least until last July when people were found eaten around the Arklay Mountains. Some speculated that Umbrella is connected to all that, but everyone else ignored them. Perhaps this outbreak is Umbrella's fault all along.

Never the less, she cannot bring herself to care any further of that. Survival is her most important thing now. That, and the truth about her real body.

"So...?" Dean's question brings Kash back.

"...Lets head to the warehouse behind Prankster and Gamble."

"Are you crazy, Kash? Brenda told me what happened before you came here, so I know why you'd have your hopes high for that place, but it's surrounded by all kinds of freaks right now."

"How do you know?"

"He's right, Kash." Brenda interrupts. "I went to look, myself. Monsters are all over the place..."

"Listen, I have a better idea." Dean pushes the altar from where he stands. Kash moves back to give way to him. When he's done, she can see a square-shaped stone with swivels sticking out of it, where the altar used to be. "A priest once told me that there's an old labyrinth down here. No one's ever entered this place since they built it, and the church committee won't let anyone in."

"And this is...?" She asks as she crouches down to take a closer look.

"This is supposed to be the way in but... there seems to be a kind of trick here. I couldn't figure it out, but if you two can solve it, this may lead us somewhere."

"I donno about this, man..." Kash scratches her head. A labyrinth? It sounds pretty absurd as an escape route. She does not know where it really lead to, and while going to the warehouse is dangerous, at least she knows the way. She can also just ask Dean to cover with sniper fire while she clears the path, even though the fact that he missed when he tried to shoot her at closer range is a bit worrying. Then again, there is a chance to take in exploring the labyrinth. There cannot be any zombies or freaks down there too – So she thinks.

"Alright then...We'll see what this shit's about." Still crouching, Kash rubs her hands around the stone. Upon further examination, she notices a square-shaped collapsed lining around the edge, and a carving which looks like she can put her four fingers in it. She tries putting her fingers and lifting it. It was really heavy, but she is confident that it is not why she cannot pull it up.

"Kash, I tried. It won't move." Dean takes a few steps further to sit on the elevated floor near the wall. He takes out a cigarette and puts it in his mouth before he lights it up.

"Can you please don't smoke...?" Brenda protests as she begins crouching down near Kash and ogles at the stone.

"Sorry, Brenda. I haven't smoked anything since the start of all this."

Kash looks at him for a moment, as the smoke from the cigarette carries over to her nose. Then she brings back her attention to the stone, on which she can barely make out something written on it.

_of which flows from Vesuvius_

_of which Zeus punishes with_

_of which runs within you_

_of which fills the ocean_

_of which we step on_

_of nothing_

"...the hell...?"

"Messed up with your head, eh Kash?"

"Just keep smoking, will ya?"

"...You're telling him to keep smoking and kill our brain cells when we need it the most?" Both of them look at Brenda. Kash decides to ignore Dean and examine the swivels. She tries pulling one up, and she sees a black string attached to it from underneath. She tries pulling other swivels as well, and they are also attached to strings: blue, white, red, orange and brown.

"Maybe we don't really need it the most." Kash thinks she knows what is the meaning of the writing, and so she proceeds to pull the swivels in this order: orange, white, red, blue, brown and black. Right after she pulls the last swivel, they all hear a 'click' sound. When she tries to lift up the stone, it opens, albeit halfway due to its weight.

"Whoa! You opened it?"

"God...! Now I know... why... you can't... solve... this lameass puzzle!" She says to Dean while trying hard to open the hatch-like stone cover. Brenda lends her hands to lift it as well, and finally it reveals a pitch-black hole. All of them now crouch around this hole.

"...Uh... I wonder how deep this is..." Dean hesitates. "Maybe this really isn't a good idea."

"You have a quarter?"

"...Yeah... why?"

Kash takes a coin from Dean without answering his question. Then she holds the coin at the same level as the floor and lets go. Shortly after, she hears the sound of it hitting something. "...Nearly two seconds. Probably less than two stories deep."

"Less than two stories deep...?" Brenda looks at her.

"Well, if you gotta look..." She grabs her USP and turns on the light attached to it. She can see it clearer with the gun pointed into: A round hole surrounded by sand-brown bricks, and and its bottom is barely illuminated due to its depth.

"Is that a human bone...?" Brenda hints to something she sees just at the edge of the visible bottom.

"Human or not,..." Kash stands up as she turns off the light on her USP and put in on the strap's holster. "It's not like you're coming along."

Brenda suddenly becomes quiet as she looks at the woman, grabbing some ammunitions from the altar into her waist pouch. When she looks at Dean, he only says, "Hey, don't look at me. Either way, I gotta stick to this church and look after Woods until you make sure it's safe."

"Oh yeah, where's Mr. Woods' backpack?" Kash asks Dean as she grabs Wood's shotgun at one of the long benches. The wall near the bench, which has 'The end is extremely fucking nigh' graffiti on it, attracts her attention before she moves on.

"Have you forgotten? The burning Big Bird fell right on top of it!"

There is no way she can forget when she does not know what really happened after she sees Mr. Woods fall. Neither can she be bothered to figure it out. Kash chooses to ignore all that, and the fact that she lost her Kit-Kats in Mr. Woods' backpack.

"I wanna go with you, Kash." Brenda's words bring Kash's attention and Dean's towards her. "I wanna make myself useful for once."

"You'll only get in the way." Kash checks her sawed-off shotgun for any remaining shells. "You're better off staying here."

"No, I won't. You taught me how to use the gun and I can handle it. Just tell me how to use the shotgun as well."

"I don't wanna be responsible for your life anymore."

"I'M NOT ASKING YOU TO BE RESPONSIBLE!!." An awkward silence follows. She looks at Brenda, and then her patched right arm, which she holds. Looking like she is almost going to cry, she smiles at the woman. "I told you myself at the school to leave me alone. Now I have nothing to lose anyway, so just let me do something while there's still time."

Kash realizes that Brenda is probably talking about that bite, and the rumor mentioned in the newspaper article. As she sits still on the bench, she begin to think of how she could have prevented it if she were not in a hurry to leave that grocery store. Of course she refuses to believe that a mere bite could change people into rotten monstrosities, but she still cannot deny all the possibilities surrounding the nature of this incident. Guilt begins to creep into her.

"You said that we all have the rights to live our lives until the last second, but I don't want to live in vain... I want to have a purpose. That way, I'll have no regrets".

The awkward silence takes place again. Kash stares emptily at the floor, and even as she hears the girl's footsteps, she continues to stay that way. During this moment, she can feel flashes of unknown memory in her head. She can almost remember having the same feeling of guilt not very long ago. Along with it, she can almost hear someone mentioning the name 'Ada', and a man's terrified scream. All that stops when she feels a sudden sharp pain in her head. She holds her head until shortly after when she hears Dean asking something.

"...Excuse me? Am I... missing anything?"

"No. Nothing at all." Kash stands up. She can see Brenda inserting some 9mm cartridges into her pocket. "Hey Dean, can I have your Glock?"

"Uh... no? It's the only gun I have left. You don't expect me to use the rifle all the time, do you? Besides, I spent a fortune customizing this baby!"

"...Damn... Brenda, put this around you."

Kash takes out her sawed-off M1100 and stick it towards Brenda. The girl looks into her eyes for several seconds before she takes it. She then teaches the girl on the basics of shooting, pumping and reloading. She also teaches her how to use the 686 revolver. When she is done dividing ammunition, she takes out her USP and removes the Universal Tactical light and attach it to Brenda's M9.

"Here." Dean pulls Kash's attention to him, and she sees him throwing a MagLite flashlight towards her before she catches it. "I suppose you'll need this too."

"Thanks."

When both Kash and Brenda finish doing preparations, all of them once again gather around the hole. Dean ties a rope around the stone cover's hinges, while she continues to illuminate the hole with her flashlight and examine the hole further. When Dean throws the rope down, she can see that its end is only barely long enough for her to reach her hands in case she needs to go back up.

"Listen up, ladies." Kash looks at Dean, still not getting used to being treated as a woman. "As safe as this place can get, I still can't guarantee that nothing bad will happen, so I'm going to shut this hole for now. If you need to get back up here, just hit the cover three times."

"...Great... Guess this one's yours."

"O.K. Now hurry up and go down there. Nature is calling me!"

She looks at him, worrying if he is reliable or not with his goofy nature. Then she notices Brenda staring into the hole, illuminating it with her M9's light.

"Having second thoughts, Brenda?"

"No." Brenda still has her eyes into the labyrinth's floor. "Go down the hole?"

"Hell yeah."

Brenda holds the rope tight, and slowly descends. The time she takes before Kash can hear her feet hitting the gushing sand feels like forever, but she still goes off without getting hurt. When both of them are already inside, Dean peeks on them from the top.

"Good luck, ladies!"

When Dean closes the stone cover, the two of them cannot see anything but the line of light flashing from Brenda's M9's light. Kash turns on the flashlight Dean gave to her to better see her surroundings: a passageway of sorts, its width can barely fit two persons. The walls and the curved ceiling are all made of bricks, and she notices something being stuck to the wall right next to her, slightly above her head. The flashlight illuminating it reveals a skull, nailed to the wall with a small thick candle above its head. From the disproportioned bits on top it, she realizes that it has been used before. Brenda, who was examining the wall on the opposite path suddenly screams, and when she turns around to see the girl, she sees scrambled remains of a human skeleton, slightly buried under the sand.

When Kash points her flashlight in front of her, all she can see, besides more skeletons littering the path ahead, is just darkness. She wonders just how long this passageway is.

"This ain't no labyrinth... This is a fucking catacomb."

"Wha... what do we do now?"

"These skeletons ain't gettin' up... We should just go ahead."

With her gun aimed forward and the flashlight thrusting through the dark, Kash begins to walk, cautiously. "Stay real close to me. Watch my back and where you're stepping."

"A... alright..." Brenda begins aiming, with her back close to the woman's, and walks backwards. As they travel further down the passage, it is not the abundance of skeletons that raises Kash's curiosity, but what is left of their clothes. It seems to her that many of them are quite recent in fashion, and the amount of child-sized skeletons is not small either. Adding to that, many of the skulls she encountered also have severe cracks on their heads, as if they were killed with a blunt object.

"Kash..." Brenda interrupts Kash's thoughts on the remains as both of them are moving.

"What."

"I'm sorry for the way I treated you, the first few hours we met."

"Do you now..." She begins to wonder why now, of all times. She still looks at the skeletons along her way.

"I really am. I mean, I really thought I saw you going out of Gene's house, but... guess I was wrong."

"...I've said this before and I'll say it again: I had _never_ killed anyone until I woke up at school with some undead looking to feast on ma' ass. Who is this Gene guy to you anyway?"

"We were in love with each other." Kash turns her head to look at the girl, still aiming her gun. "Anyway, you saved me so many times and I've only said mean things to you. I'm sorry..."

"Still, I failed to save you from that bite." The incident at the grocery stores comes back to haunt her mind as she returns her view to the path ahead. "How's your arm doin'? Have you told Dean?"

"It still kinda hurts, but I'm used to it now. And I'm afraid that he'll shoot me, so I just told him that I hit a glass shard." What Brenda says also begins to remind of the time in the car. Both of them  
are out of words for a moment.

"...Ya know... What I said to Woods back when we were in the car... At that time, I just wanted to shut him up. Truth is, if you do become one of them, I don't know if I can really do it. After all... I was partly responsible."

"..."

"Come to think of it, I haven't come across any zombies who used to be ma' parents, ma' little sister, or ma' homies yet. I really hope I never will. I really hope they're safe, somewhere, but..." Kash shakes her head and hisses, trying to shake off the sudden, brief, sharp pain in her head. "Damn, this outbreak is messin' up with ma' head!"

"I thought about that all the time. Maybe that's why I was so weak..." Brenda's tone begins to contain despair. Kash's heart also aches now as she hears it. "If the rumor in that newspaper is true, then... I guess it's O.K., if you're the one to pull the trigger."

"...Now, let's just stay optimistic and focus on getting outta this shit alive. You don't have any urge to eat me up, do you?" Brenda looks at the Kash as she says it, and woman looks back with a smile.

"Can't say..." Brenda's words alarmed her for a moment. What she says next, however, annoys her. "That wannabe 'nigga' accent of yours does get on my nerves occasionally. It totally clashes with your beautiful figure and Asian face. And what's with that dress you're in before, when you talk and act like a man at all times?"

"...Just shut cho' mouth, will ya?!" She has to agree to Brenda's comment about her current body. She has seen it naked herself when she was changing her clothes: it is as slim and fit as any girl would dream of. The boobs are not so large, but they are well-shaped. The buttocks are firm, and she cannot even think of the 'lower front'. She is sure that if this outbreak never happened, she would like to 'explore' further, but the thought that this is the very same body of a woman who might have killed three people turns her off immediately. That, and the thought of being attracted to her own body is a sick one to her, even if it technically is not.

Yet, what Kash said to Brenda made her laugh a bit. She can see the girl's face as she did it. It is more honest than anything she has ever seen from her face so far. She feels glad that she can cheer her up through that conversation, even if it is only a bit.

Kash and Brenda are already soaked in sweat after walking through the passageway for a long time, when they finally reach a sort of chamber. They can see no skeletons around it, but the walls on their sides are filled with holes, each around two inches in diameter. On the wall ahead of them, there are several objects engraved. A rectangle depression to its left also contains an engraving with what seems like buttons, accompanied with what is probably Roman numbers from I to IX (1 to 9).

_A sitting frog? - IV_

_A crawling baby? - IV_

_A horse? - IV_

_An ant? - VI_

_An octopus? - nothing_

_A laying mermaid? - II_

_A bird? with its wings spread - nothing_

_A chicken? - II_

_(on the depression above buttons) A man? lying on a stretcher? carried by 3 men?_

"...This is really creeping me out." The woman looks to her sides, to the holes-ridden walls.

"I have a bad feeling, Kash..." Brenda aims her gun around while she still looks at the buttons. "Maybe we should turn back?"

"Yeah..."

Both of them start to head back into the passage, but suddenly, a wall surfaces from underneath the sand. They run in an attempt to get through before it completely shuts the passage, but the wall does it faster.

"FUCK!!!" Kash screams her lungs out in frustration, before she kneels down. Meanwhile, Brenda goes to check the wall that shut them in.

"...We're... completely locked in here..."

"I KNOW THAT!!" Brenda is shaken by Kash's angry statement. Then the woman takes a deep breath and stands back up. "...We have no choice but to meddle with that shit."

Both of them go back to the rectangle depression. With Brenda flashing at the buttons with her light-equipped M9, she examines the buttons once again. After considering the clues shown to the side, Kash decides to try her luck.

"...Six...?" Kash hesitates the first few times she tries to push the button. Finally, with her eyes closed and the fingers already touching the answer she think is right, she presses it with all her might. Instantaneously after, both of them gets knocked off ground by a loud noise of metals clashing, and her heart feels like it stops beating for several seconds when they see narrow metal cylinders stick out from the holes at eye-blinking speed. The state of psychological paralysis remains in both of them until they see the depression opens from top down, slowly revealing a wooden door.

"...Thank God those things didn't come out flying at us..." Kash stands up, albeit slowly, for the near-death experience somewhat weakens her knees. She thanks God again in her heart for making her strong enough to not pee in her pants.

"How on Earth does this place works...? And who built it...?" Brenda slowly tries to stand up. Seeing her sluggishly doing it however, Kash sticks out her hand to the girl. Kash pulls her up when the woman takes her hand.

"Hell if I know..." She pats the sand off her pants. While Brenda does the same to her jeans, Kash can see that the passage they came from earlier is still closed. "One thing for sure, we should just go ahead."

Both of them point their lights on the varnished brown door. There are spots of dry blood underneath a thin layer of dust covering the door, but she notices that its knob is fairly clean.

"...Someone's been here before us. Brenda, get over here." Kash signals Brenda to stand on the right side of the door, where its hinges are. She follows, and slowly but nervously begins to aim her M9. Meanwhile, the woman keeps her USP in the holster, and takes out the Remington 870 hanged around her body. Using her left hand, she rotates it cautiously in attempt to release little to no noise. Then, she pushes it lightly enough so the door remains unlocked. With her left hand holding both the flashlight and the shotgun's pump, and the trigger finger in her right already in the trigger guard, ready to fire at any time, she pulls her left leg up and thrust it with all the force she can muster.

Shortly after, Kash and Brenda dash forward into the room. As the woman simultaneously aims her shotgun, her eyes wildly examine the surroundings, of which the darkness covering them is betrayed by the beam from her flashlight: The first thing she sees is a table, with shackles on all four corners. She walks around it, trying to see if there is anything on it, but it was something she feels smothering her boots that bothers her instead. She looks down to see a t-shirt the size of children's. The ripples which make much of the shirt's design would have made it a cute wear for little girls, if it was not stained with blood. A faint hint of stench begins sneaking into her nostrils.

A small button can be seen on the wall close to the blood-stained shirt. She kicks it, and hears a rattling sound of screeching bricks. When she looks through their way in, she sees that the passage is now open again. "Now we can go back."

"What in the name of Jesus Christ..." She hears Brenda's voice as the girl seems to be staring at something, on the other side of the table.

"What did you find?"

"...Uh... help yourself..."

Kash goes around the table to get to Brenda, while at the same time having her attention unwillingly grabbed on a glass cupboard, filled with various 'toys' she remembers seeing in pornographic magazines. When she finally reaches Brenda, she notices an open album lying on top of a small drawer. In it are pictures of children, boys and girls, caught while being treated worse than animals, using the table and the various toys you came across earlier. She does not want to flip through any further, but the date printed on one of the pictures compelled her to find out. The most recent of the pictures taken was 5th April 1998. She begins to understand why Brenda could not say it: Neither could she.

"This whole place... this _whole TOWN_ is fucked up. And man, I thought I'll grow tired of saying that." Kash grabs the album and throws it across the room in disgust. During this time, she notices a lighter on top of the drawer. She tests it, and she keeps it in one of her pockets once she confirms that it still works. "Let's just get the fuck out of here."

"Well, there's another door..." Kash looks in the direction Brenda faces, and she gets assured by her words: There is another door to her side.

Both of them go to it. They can see that it is already slightly open, Kash simply kicks it in the same manner as the door they came from earlier. It reveals another tight passage, but this time, they see someone standing only several yards away. It seems like a man, in priestwear, with his back towards them. Once the woman aims her shotgun towards him, the beam from the flashlight she holds simultaneously with the shotgun prompted the man to turn around. She does not get surprised at first when she sees his profile and the decayed tissues all over his cheek, but when he completely turns towards them, you gasp in recognition.

"Father Daniel..." In his full red-head zombie glory, he does not move for a while. He matches every aspect of the stronger zombie that they encountered at the grocery store. When he begins charging towards them, Kash waits for the moment he gets close enough for her to blow his head off. But then again, before she can pull the trigger, Brenda who is standing behind the woman fires her revolver to his face. Two shots missed, but four more hit home, and when the super-zombie falls, all that is left of his head is his jaw. Everything else are splattered on the walls and in between the sand.

"Now that's one face I sure won't hesitate to shoot." Brenda reloads her revolvers while Kash gets closer to the dead zombie on the ground. "All that sick stuff... must be his doing."

Kash sees a piece folded paper sticking out of one of his pockets, which she takes out and read.

_Dear God,_

_I am a sinner. I love committing sin. And I pose as a loyal servant of You in front of the community to hide my sins. Don't blame me. Blame Yourself and your churches for imposing such torturous rules. _

_All these years as a priest, having been born in a family obsessed of You, my emotions and my desires never mattered to anyone. All my fellow creatures constantly pick on me for my religious upbringing and it makes me sick! Why can't you grant me a better life when I have endured the first 20 years of my life doing nothing but devoting myself to You and preach others to do the same?!_

_I don't remember when, but I decided that I've HAD IT. I had to let it all go. Just then, a really cute little girl passed by one of Your churches when I was in Massachusetts. She might have lost her way somehow. She might have been dumped by desperate couples thinking that I can give her a better life. What fools her parents are if that's what they think, for I have problems on my own and I don't have time to look out for others. Yet all that did not matter. I could only see her cute, innocent face that has yet to learn a taste of a realm You created called 'reality'. I could see her pure white skin underneath her pretty clothes. And her curly blonde hair... At that time I realized, that I found my true object of desires._

_I enjoyed 'playing' with them. I enjoyed hearing them cry and squeal for mercy. And when they break, there would always be another stray kid, or some couple who blindly trusted me with their children for my imposed image. How foolish of them all! _

_But my years of self-liberation could not last long. People begin to realize what's wrong, and I was forced to move away and resume an incredibly boring life I once torturously had to go through. I thought I would just wither away in my hypocritical sermons and the jealousy I feel every time I see newlyweds kiss each other in front of my very own eyes. Then again, Satan has plenty of tricks doesn't he?_

_When I came to this church, I found this old labyrinth. It sure seems to have plenty of traps, and how they built all this is beyond me. Never the less, it was a perfect place for me to free myself from all moral constraints You imposed on us. What's better, thanks to the sewers connected with the end of this labyrinth, I found the Mayor with an Umbrella representative who is bribing him! He did not like me at first, but then he discovered the same kind of lust I have. Not before long, we share this place, which he accessed through a manhole in the back of his residence. Indeed, he had a boring upbringing as well._

_Very attentive Umbrella was too, for they provided everything we need to satisfy our lusts in return for our influence to keep this town under wraps. Those pitiful kids they took from Thailand and many other poor countries cry harder than the kids here!_

_Suddenly, they stopped sending me anything since April. Just when I thought it would all last, the Mayor told me that they are having problems in one of their secret labs and don't have time for us. He also told me that this facility they have underneath his residence also had to be shut down. What a bummer that was, just when I thought this would last._

_And now, this outbreak has come upon us. Is there really no more room in Hell? Are you condemning me for all the things I did? Either way, I don't care. As I stay in here, I wonder what it's like to be in Hell. Then again, Hell must have been already full, so it's Your loss! AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!_

"...All the mothafucka needed was a fucking life." Kash takes out the lighter and burns the paper. "I don't believe in Christianity, but I believe in God, and He wouldn't have written that crazy piece of shit called 'Bible'."

"Oh yeah... what _perfect place and timing_ to debate about religion. Anyway, what's in the paper?" Brenda tries to look at the burning paper, but the woman moves it away from her, and drops it down when it is almost completely turn to ashes.

"Nothing much..." Kash steps on the paper, both to put out the fire and to release her frustration.

Just then, they hear a sharp shriek coming from the direction of the passage ahead. After it is replaced with the sound of heavy steps getting louder, it is followed by another shriek. Listening to all that suddenly brings Kash back to the feeling she got when she fought the bird. Her heart begins to beat so fast and she almost loses grip of her shotgun and flashlight. Then she hears her own voice inside her head.

_"If you die here, you'll go to the same place as the mad man."_

Thinking that something really bad will happen, Kash pulls Brenda by her hand as both of them rush back into the room.

"Brenda!! Stay away from the door!!" The woman says it while she pulls the knob of the door towards her with all her strength to keep it closed, for she feels that whatever are coming for them are bad news.

"Wha...!? What's wrong!?"

"Just stay away from the door!!"

Not long after that, Kash can feel something banging on the door loudly, along with the same shrieking. Then she begins to feel the door being pulled opposite of her. The strength of whatever is on the other side almost defeats her, but she still manages to keep it closed.

"Listen, Brenda. Go back... to the church... and... ask Dean... to help."

"But...!?"

"GET CHO' ASS BACK TO THE CHURCH, NOW!!" While Kash is saying this, two sharp claws penetrate the wooden door. It is obvious to her and Brenda that the door will not last long, and not even the table with shackles looks heavy enough for her to ask Brenda to use it to block the door, which is why she needs to keep on holding the door to buy some time for Brenda to escape.

"OK! I'll go! Just don't die on me, got it!?" The girl goes off through the way they came here and disappears into the darkness of the passageway, doing just as what she told her.

Suddenly she sees another couple of claws penetrating through, of which its position is so close to tearing her hands apart. Kash realizes that a few more stabs through and this door is done for. Panic almost overcomes her, as she knows that there may be more than one of them, and they are fast, but she does not know how strong they are or how they attack. By now, she knows that she only have two choices, and she might not even live long enough to regret choosing the wrong one.

The claws tear through the door several times to make a hole big enough for her to see three pairs of eyes shining in the dark. Thinking that there is no more point in defending the door, she takes aim of her shotgun and fires two rounds. She can see that the creatures - having green-colored scales around their human-sized frog-like appearance, with claws intimidating enough to make her nervous - being pushed back a little from the blast. The minimal effect the shot inflicted on the creatures prompts her to just turn back and run.

Kash sprints out of the room. As she gathers all of your energy and force her stamina to remain consistent on her run, she can hear the sound of the door being completely destroyed, along with a shriek that sounds oddly terrifying.

_"That's right... Run. Run like you did when you killed that boy."_

The mysterious voice, in an annoyingly cynical tone, rings in her head again. The headache that comes along with it begins to blur her vision slightly. "GET THE FUCK OUTTA MY HEAD, BITCH!!"

Just after she enters the passageway that leads back to the church, she somehow falls to the sand-ridden floor. The shrieking of the creatures grows louder, and when she turns around, she can see three of them closing in on her. One of them is in mid-air, its claws ready to swipe her. It drops back to the floor however, right in front of her after she fires her shotgun towards it. When she sees another one trying to slash her legs, she flips her body backwards and pushed her hands on the ground to lift her up. She becomes surprised by how she is able to pull such acrobatic move by the time she lands on the ground, standing on her own feet again. The third creature's jump towards her however brings her back to the critical issue currently at hand: getting away from these killer frogs.

She resumes running along the passage, with the creatures following right behind, and very close, to her. As she runs through the passage which felt like it would never end, she occasionally hears the shrieking, and the sound of its claws ripping through the air, along with the heart-stopping gush of wind blowing right behind her neck. She begins to learn that this creature has a habit of attacking the head; causing her to slightly move her head down the instant she feels the wind eerily brushing her hair. She tries not to let panic, and the sharp pain in her head, get in the way of her concentration to anticipate its claws' lust for her skull.

Just when her legs are starting to give up from lactic acid poisoning, Kash begins to see light, and the rope. Thinking that the creatures are too close for her to get back to the top, she quickly turns around and fires her shotgun. The tight passage which groups the creatures together work against them, as the three buckshot rounds knock two of them to the ground and killed one. She does not take the time to see them thrashing on the ground, probably due to the wrath of the pellets tearing through their scales and flesh, and immediately grab the rope. When she looks up, she can see Brenda, still struggling to climb near the top, with Dean pulling the rope near the hole's edge to help the girl.

"HEY!! I'M NOT THAT STRONG!!" Dean yells at Kash, trying to tell her to wait until Brenda gets up first.

"THESE SCALY MOTHAFUCKAS ARE CRAZY FOR MA' HEAD, YA KNOW!?" She yells back with her hands tightly on the rope and her arms pushed to the limits to get herself up. Her eyes are dead set on the green monsters, still struggling to get up.

"I'm... almost at the top...!!" Brenda seems to be trying hard as well. When Dean sees that she is within the reach of his hands, he lets go of the rope and immediately grabs Brenda's wrist. This however causes Kash to fall slightly, and by this time the scaly headhunters are already back up.

"HEY!! HURRY THE FUCK UP!!" Kash yells in desperation. When one of the creatures dashes towards her, she lets go of the rope and fire the slug round, which she forgot she loaded as the seventh and eighth round. Her blurry vision causes her to miss its head, and instead the slug rips a hole through its right leg, effectively bringing its face back to the floor.

"KASH!! GRAB ON TO THE ROPE!!" She does what Brenda tells her, but when she tries to pull herself up, she begins to realize the pain on her shoulder from the slug bullet's recoil.

"DAMN IT!!"

"WHAT'S WRONG!?" Brenda has just grabbed the rope from the top to help Kash up when she sees the woman letting go of her right hand.

"MY SHOULDER...!!" Her right hand grabs the rope and she tries to push herself up again. She tries to ignore the pain - of which her tears are streaming down her cheek from the intensity, which increases with her effort- from her right shoulder, but her right hand loses grip of the rope again. She looks up to see Brenda and Dean who are holding the rope for a moment, and then to one of the creatures who go back up again.

"Brenda, give it all you've got!"

"Alright!"

She does not hear their conversation. Instead, she looks deep into the creature's eyes as it begins to advance towards her. Still holding the rope with her left hand, the tightness of the grip reflects her disappointment, her blurry eyes delve into the creature's, and she closes it just after she notices it jumps.

Suddenly, she feels a strong force pulling her up. It was high enough to take her feet away, within a fraction of an inch, from its claws. She looks up to see Brenda and Dean, with veins all over their hands, pulling her up.

"HOLD ON TIGHT!!" Brenda tells Kash, while she looks back at the creature, now standing still on the ground after its failed attempt. Its eyes and hers meet again.

"WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOO HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!! YEAH!!" Was she able to break glass with her scream, all of the church's window would have exploded. The joy overwhelms her heart, and more so, when the creature jumps again to claw her up, but is only disappointed when Brenda and Dean manage to pull her higher up. "KISS MY WHITE AND IMPROVED ASS, YOU FUCKING TOAD!!"

When the woman is just within his reach, Dean grabs her left hand and pulls her up. Brenda was going to do the same with her right hand, but she warns her instead. "Hey! Don't yank my right hand!"

"Sorry..."

Once she is back into the church, Kash throws the shotgun aside and sit on the floor, catching her breath desperately. Dean and Brenda begin to fire their guns into the hole, and soon after, the death cries of the creatures echoed.

When she looks behind her to find Woods, Kash become shocked to see him lying in the pool of his own blood on the floor next to the bench she last saw him on. Close to him are four queer insect-like beings with eight legs, all with a sharp claw, laying idle within a green liquid splattered around. She walks towards Woods while examining the newfound creature, probably already dead. When she gets close enough to him, she can see his neck torn open, revealing flesh and arteries. She finds it hard to believe that she could still talk to him just several hours ago.

"Hey, what the hell happened here?!" She looks at Dean. Brenda who turns towards the woman closes her mouth in shock.

"A bunch of Drain Deimoses broke through the stained glasses above."

"Drain-what?"

"Drain Deimos." She sees him walk towards her, with his face all sour. "That's the name of the creature given by Umbrella as part of their B.O.W. project."

"Dean..." Kash gets close to him. Her nose is less than an inch from his and she stares angrily into his light brown eyes. "I think you owe us something."


	7. Chapter 7: Darker Side of The Truth II

Chapter 7: **Darker Side of The Truth part II**

The orange light from the setting sun gets darker as time passes. As Kash sits on a bench with Brenda by her side, Dean in front of her, and in the middle, Mr. Woods' wrapped body; she silently begins to sort out all the things Dean had just told her.

Indeed, the zombies were a by-product of Umbrella, but they are not the only one. The project, which involves a micro-organism called the Tyrant virus, or T-virus, aims to produce biological weapons. They were carried out in the mansion within Arklay mountains, just like the remaining S.T.A.R.S. team members tried to prove, not long ago. However, their only evidence: a slideshow of mutated creatures produced by Umbrella was dismissed as hoax, and they cannot start a case since the mansion was blown up, along with other, more concrete evidence.

Admittedly, he himself did not believe them, until he came across a reporter name Ben Bertolucci, who claims to have evidence of Umbrella's other exploits. He showed Dean a document containing details on new monsters produced in a secret location within Raccoon City, of which how he knows the name 'Drain Deimos', and identified the green creatures that attacked Kash as 'Hunters'. He also has proof that the chief of police, Brian Irons has been guarding the secret facility. Now, Dean believes that he might have already taken shelter at the police station.

"Why didn't you tell us earlier, huh?" Kash looks at Dean. She wants to punch his face so bad, but she knows that she needs to restrain her fist. It is not time to argue.

"Because that won't really help us!" Dean sighs and scratches his head. "All I know is what Umbrella does and the names of these freaks. Does that tell us how we can win against them, or even how to get out of here alive?"

Kash looks down at Mr. Woods' corpse, without a word to say in return.

"That's why I gave you those bullets, including those slug shells, because the only thing I'm sure of is that you'll need all the firepower you can get. So, the one who owes something here is YOU and NOT ME."

"Alright... We're sorry." Brenda's soft voice tries to calm Dean down. "She just had a tough time down there..."

"Well, news flash: Those eight-legged freaks damn near killed me too." Dean steps towards the altar with his back turned on the woman. She can hear that he sounds irritated as well. "We are all having a tough time. _We are all trying to stay alive_. Keep that in mind."

"ALRIGHT!! ALRIGHT!! MY BAD!!" Kash stands up. She begins to approach Dean slowly. "But you said it yourself that your boss had somethin' to do with the whole shit. How can I be sure you're not hiding anymore secrets? How can I be sure that you're not working with your boss? _How. Can I be sure. That I can trust you_?"

"Kash!!" Brenda yells at her, probably trying to remind her of just how serious her accusation is. As for Dean, he only turns to get face to face with her.

"You know what? I can ask the same thing to you." The expression on Dean's face is as scary as Kash's. His taller built makes her tilt her head slightly upwards. "A friend of mine was working on a case of double murders of two top Raccoon University professors, and all witnesses and evidence point to an Asian woman in her twenties who always wear red. That _totally_ matches the description for YOU."

Oh, not this again - you think.

"And don't start on being Asian, 'cause there aren't many Asians in this town, and I certainly have never seen anyone like you around. Add to that, Brenda told me you're still in high school, but you fired those guns away like a trained mercenary and none of the handful Asian families here even own a gun license!"

Her throat becomes dry upon hearing all that. She wants to tell him who she really is, and what she believes happened to her, but the absurdity of it makes her think it will only make things worse. Dean's stare further worsens her mind as he steps further forward, making her step back.

"You _killed_ them, right?"

"_You killed them, right?_"

The mysterious voice rings in Kash's head again, mimicking Dean's words and blends with it.

"_Yes, you killed them. Tell him you did! Tell him just how far you would sink for your 'mission'!_"

Dean no longer says anything as he pushes her back, but the voice continues. Her head begins to hurt during this, and she holds her head with both of her hands. "No... I didn't, you bitch!! Get the fuck outta my head!!"

"_Tell him how you fooled John into making him believe that you love him! Tell him just how quick you decided to shoot that kid to death!_"

The pain in her head intensifies. It causes her to kneel down. She still holds her head, as if it may brush the voices away, but it continues to resound. Brenda, who notices her weird actions, gets closer to her. "Kash...!? What's wrong!? Kash!?"

Now on all fours, Kash begins to puke. Her blurry vision is made worse by the tears flowing from her eyes. Never the less, her hearing is not affected, as she can soon clearly hears loud thumping sounds and cracklings on the floor.

"Damn it...! Of all times!?" She can hear Dean talking and running. Soon she hears the sound of the bolt being pulled. Then she can feel Brenda putting her left arm around the girl's neck and pulling her up. She feels that monsters might have broken into the church again.

"Hold on, Kash!" She tries to do as Brenda told her, but she feels very weak. Supported by her, Kash can still walk a bit. Suddenly, within her blurry vision, she notices two silhouettes moving rapidly towards her. One of them is hanging on the ceiling and another one is coming from the hallway. Brenda must have noticed as well, because she can feel the girl dragging her into the opposite direction. She can already hear Dean firing his rifle, but it seems he is occupied on other monsters. With her current condition, she thinks she will probably die, but she decided she will not just give up without a fight.

She remembers the green mixture sealed in a clear plastic she kept in her pocket. She never got herself involved in drugs and she never wanted to, but thinking that she will probably die anyway, she takes them out in the hope that it is a drug, and whatever 'high' it can bring to her will soften the awful circumstances of death.

Brenda stops dragging the woman to take aim with her revolver. After she fired two rounds, she notices Kash tearing the sealed plastic. "What are you doing!? These things are coming for us!!"

Brenda's voice sunk inside Dean's rifle's booms however, as Kash takes the chunk of punched plants into her mouth and chew it. The first effect it immediately has on her however, is how it increases the bitterness of the gastric juice she puked out earlier, of which some still remains in her mouth. After only mildly mincing the herbs, she decided to just swallow it in, whole. She sticks out her tongue in disgust of its taste.

"Fuck!!! Does weed taste this bad!?"

"Weed!?" Brenda resumes dragging Kash by her shirt as she sits on the floor, with the two monsters directly ahead of them. "HELLO!? MONSTERS ARE ABOUT TO CHEW US!!"

Within her blurry vision, the seemingly black figure on the ceiling falls to the surface and approaches her. This is when Kash decided to take out her .45 and just fire within its shape. From the way she notices it reacts though, only one shot hit it from the six rounds she spits out of the gun. Perhaps realizing that it is too dangerously close to comfort, Brenda stops again and fires her revolver as well. By the time the girl empties it, the creature shrieks its last. She panics as she sees one more still alive and approaching them fast.

During this time, Kash's vision gradually improves. The ringing in her head begins to subside and the voice faints. Unlike earlier when all she can see are colors of orange, brown, shades of gray and black, she can now almost distinguish the entire church layout in front of her, although it still slightly doubles. She can also recognize the creature coming from the hallway as the same type of creature that killed Mr. Woods. She can hear Brenda scream when she sees it jump to grab her face.

It fails to do so. When she lifts up her gun, the end of the barrel meets its bloody mouth on its body in mid-air, and she fires at it three times. Then, it falls in between her open legs, spasms as its surrounding by its broken teeth, and cries its last.

Kash kicks one of its eight legs away from her, but when she wants to get up, her knees still feels weak. Once again, Brenda puts her left arm around her neck and supports her. After that, Kash sees Dean, extracting the jacket out of his rifle after he killed his last share of freaks. When all of them hear more shrieking from the roof, he orders.

"Into the hole!"

Brenda holds Kash up and walks her to the hole leading into the labyrinth. The woman manages to grab her shotgun, standing at one of the benches along the way before the both of them reach it. She then throws the shotgun into the hole first. Gathering all the strength she can on her legs, she lightly pushes Brenda aside and stand up on her own.

"I'm... cool now..."

"You sure?" Brenda was going to tuck her revolver on her waist, but the heat on its barrel stops her. "You look really sick..."

"You can't... support me... all the way to down there... can you..?" Kash kneels down besides the hole and grabs the rope tied to the stone cover. Then she takes out your flashlight, turn it on and puts it in her mouth. She can see the dead Hunters as she looks down and insert her leg.

Her weak condition and right shoulder, which still hurts a little, causes her to nearly fall on her way to rappel down. She also loses her legs' hold on the wall at times, causing her body to hit it when it happens. She makes it to the labyrinth's floor still, although she decided to reach it by letting go of the rope while she is still several meters high, and she falls on her back right next to one of the dead Hunters. The flashlight falls from her mouth when she coughs from the floor's impact to her back.

Brenda soon makes it inside as well and kicks off the Hunters' body away from Kash. Before Dean gets it, he unties the rope and ties it again; this time around the heavy stone cover itself. When all three of them are inside, all three of them pull the rope, just in the nick of time before one of the eight-legged creatures manage to get it.

"This... is the most... fucked up day ever..." Kash grabs her fallen flashlight and tries to sit.

"Well, _you_ are certainly fucked up as well, by that standard." Dean smirks after he says it. "I pressured you a bit and you go crazy and puke shit."

"Fuck off, Dean..." She leans on the passageway's floor, now with her shotgun. "What I'm going through now is worse than you can fucking imagine..."

"Oh REALLY? Pray tell."

Kash points the flashlight at him. With all the suspicion she caught up until now, she decides that it is time to just tell them what had happened to her. Of course, they most likely will not believe her, or simply dismiss her as going crazy, but with her condition getting down to the point of physical sickness, she feels that there is nothing to lose. She has all the memory as herself anyway, although she is not really sure.

"Alright..." She takes a deep breath. "Before I tell you this, I want both of you to stay quiet and don't say a damn thing until I'm done. Also, I don't do drugs... probably... and I'm sane enough to be able to hold these guns and not fire it to YOUR FUCKING HEAD."

After she intentionally raise her tone on the last few words while looking straight at Dean, Kash tells them who she really is and what she remember happened, before and after she wakes up inside the bloody cafeteria. She also told them of her encounter with her 'copy' inside the church's toilet. Needless to say, both Brenda's and Dean's face reveal very negative reactions.

"So, you're saying that the other 'you' somehow put you into a sex change to lift the blame on someone else, who unfortunately happens to be a wannabe 'gangsta' kid, which is you?"

"It's _not_ another me. Just some bitch who somehow turned me into herself."

"Whatever." Dean wraps his arms, with a finger rubbing his cheek. "Then, how did you learn to use those guns? By playing 'Duck Hunt'? C'mon..."

"It's been bothering me, too." Kash takes a glimpse at Brenda, who looks puzzled. "Maybe whatever this bitch is capable of has transcended into me."

"Wow... such great length a trained assassin would do to cover herself up..."

"Sure wasn't great enough for having a lot of witnesses recognize her... Which is why I think that making someone else a scapegoat is the only option she would have."

"That's not what I mean. I'm talking about YOU." Kash looks up to Dean's face. "Just what makes you think I would buy all this?"

"Truthfully speaking, I don't think you'd buy into this shit, but it's the only thing I can tell." Despair takes over her mind as the woman says this. The whole situation is making it increasingly difficult for her to stay alive. It is only a matter of time before the voice kicks in again and makes her head want to explode. Not only that, with what has become of her, she is not even sure if things will be better if she does survive this.

She puts down the shotgun and takes out her handgun, which she throws towards Dean's feet. "Not that I think you're completely clean, but you can shoot me if you think I did all that. I'm tired of staying alive anyway..."

"Kash...!" Brenda looks at her, but she only keeps her eyes emptily on the sand-filled floor. She stays that way, even when Dean picks the gun up and draws it quickly against her forehead. "Dean! No!"

"Suppose my family still remains alive, they must have the same doubts as you do. Ain't that different to dying..."

"KASH!!" Brenda stands up and grabs Dean's arm, trying to pull his aim off her head, but he is too strong for the girl. The stand-off lasts for more than half a minute before he lets the gun off his hand.

"Sheeesh... If you're so eager to die, do it yourself." Dean turns away from Kash and turns on the flashlight on his shoulder strap. She takes her handgun back.

"Asshole... can't even pull the trigger for me." She puts the end of the barrel at her right temple, with her finger already within the trigger guard. Brenda gasps while looking at her, but it only makes her more eager to end her life now because she does not seem to believe her either. "Brenda, you said I killed Gene. Now you can have your revenge."

"NO!!!"

She pulls the trigger, and the gun blows. Aside from the slight discomfort in her ear, she does not feel anything. Then she realized that Brenda pushed her gun away just enough from blowing her head.

"Brenda... why did you...?" Relieved, but also disappointed, she loses grip on her gun. Then, Brenda's palm hits her cheek. It was a slap strong enough to leave a tingling sensation, as she stays there, stunned.

"You're giving up now!? After all we've been through!?" Brenda's tears begin to flow. She forcibly pulls Kash towards her and hugs her. The strength of the girl's embrace leaves her speechless. "That was my mistake, and I told you I'm sorry... Just, don't do that again, please..."

Kash's heart aches. she really does not feel like living anymore, but Brenda's tightly grabbing hands gives her a complex feeling that goes against her desire. She begins to wonder what drives Brenda to this, and why she are feeling this way for the girl.

"Alright... the drama ends here." Dean is now holding his gun firm, with his rifle hung around his body. "Are we going or not?"

Kash comes to a resolve: She will keep herself and Brenda alive for as long as she can. The girl's question earlier wakes her up, that she should not give up now. She decides to take whatever is coming ahead of her, and fight whatever is in her way; even the damn bitch who seem to have telepathic grasp on her.

"Of course we're goin', fool." Brenda lets Kash go and looks at her after hearing it. She softly pushes the girl away and hang her shotgun around her body. After she grabbed the flashlight and her handgun, she reloads with a fresh magazine and stands up with her now recovered legs.

"Kash...?"

"Don't worry, Brenda." The girl looks at her standing up. "I ain't gonna try that again. I still need to save you."

"Save her from what?" Dean turns towards Kash. She looks back, still harboring negative feelings towards him.

"Just look out for any remaining scaly mofos ahead, will ya?" Kash begins her aiming stance. Brenda still cannot hide her worries when she gets to the woman's side to look at her face.

"Kash..."

"I'm fine now." Kash tries to reassure the Brenda with her smile. "That thing that looked like weed... whatever it is, it sure helped. So, you just worry about yourself."

She smiles back.

"That stance... Miss Assassin is back." Dean wears that annoying smirk on his face again as he also begins his aiming stance.

"It's this Miss Assassin's 'skillz' that might save yo' ass later, so shut cho' fucking mouth."

"Just because I need your skills doesn't mean you can cuss me all day... So, we're just gonna clean this labyrinth up?"

"No. There's supposed to be an exit somewhere that leads to the sewers." She remembers Father Daniels' 'will'. "Psycho Priest wrote in a letter I found earlier. Said something about the Mayor using it to get into here from a manhole behind his residence."

"I know that the police station is close by Mayor's residence, but what's he got to do with this place? And who's Psycho Priest?" Dean looks at Kash.

"Go ahead and see for yourself."

All of them walk through the passageway and through the torture room, thankfully with no monsters around. Needless to say, Dean was in for a surprise of his life when he see the 'toys', the restraining table, and the album containing the unfortunate children 'in action'.

"I've been a cop for nine years and I've NEVER seen anything like this."

"And you dare called me 'fucked up'... You ain't seen shit." Kash closes her nose with her gun as she shows her resentment towards Dean in her tone. "Umbrella Incorporated provided Father Daniels and the Mayor with these kids for them to fuck around with."

"C'mon you two, we should just get out of here...!" Brenda orders while she is already waiting at the next passageway entrance where the she and Kash encountered the zombified Father Daniels. All of them move on to reach a three-way junction. Kash cannot see what is ahead of them, but then she notices depressions on the entrances to each of the ways. She ducks down and brush away the sand covering the one on the path to her right.

"More puzzles... God damn whoever built this place." Kash complains as she points her flashlight at an engraving of a Grim Reaper-like figure. She sees Brenda doing the same for the path in the middle. "What'cha got?"

"This one looks like a man in ancient armor." Soon after, she checks the path to the left. "The last one's a man laying on a bed."

"Hey... is this a really thin kid?" Dean seems to have noticed an engraving as well from the direction of which they came from. "Oh, here's some more."

"Let me look at that." All of them now surrounds Dean's discovery. Kash's mind baffles at what she is about to read;

"_Man's greed leads to conquest, but he often forgets that he will destroy everything to obtain, and in the end, there is nothing to gain but the misery of nothing. Driven into painful despair, he will destroy himself. O hail the Four Horsemen of The Apocalypse. May you vanquish us all_."

"...The grammar's pretty modern. This must've been made anywhere in this century."

"Hey Brenda, you know anything about the Four Horsemen of The Apocalypse?" Kash ignores Dean's analysis to look at her.

"I remember reading about them in Biblical articles, but I don't know exactly what it is..."

"Great... and I'm no fan of Bible at all."

"One thing for sure," Dean looks behind him, at the three paths ahead. "This Four Horsemen of The Apocalypse thing must have something to do with the engravings. Since the place is a supposed to be a labyrinth, I think we'll see more junctions like this..."

Kash knows that Dean is right. She scratches her head as she looks at the paths as well: the Grim Reaper, a man on bed, and a man in armor. Her gut feeling has been pretty accurate recently, and it is firing up her psychological alarm like mad right now, as if trying to tell her that only one of them is safe...

"...I think this shit is trying to tell us the order." She cannot confirm this yourself, but it is the feeling she gets after reading the engraved writing. "Brenda, think harder. You must know what the Four Horsemen are."

"I... don't know..." Brenda holds her forehead, brainstorming in case she is missing something. Dean only silently looks on to her.

"As for ma'self, the only thing I can be sure of is that the Grim Reaper must represent some sort of a Death figure." As would everyone else, she continues in her mind. "What other elements could lead into vanquishing us? There's the talk about conquest, and destruction. Then it leads to 'misery of nothing', causing 'painful despair', and finally another destruction. I can almost be sure that the destruction is related to Death. Then again, even if I'm right, there's no point because this will only work for the second junction."

"Conquest... isn't that related to war...?" Dean suggests. Brenda looks at him.

"Death... War..." Suddenly, Brenda claps. " RIGHT! It is Death, War, Pestilence and Famine. _They_ are the Four Horsemen of The Apocalypse!"

"Alright, now that we know what they are, the only left to do is to relate this to the riddle and the god-damn symbols." Dean stands up and looks at the start of the three paths ahead.

"No." She stands up as well, followed by Brenda. "The only thing left to do is to choose the path with the man in armor. I told you before that the riddle's supposed to contain orders. I believe we should go following just that."

"But Kash, what does the riddle have to do with them?" Brenda tilts her head sideways in confusion.

"Easy. The conquest is war. I told'ja that destruction is Death. 'Misery of nothing' is famine. 'Painful despair' is Pestilence. Finally, another destruction, another Death."

"That's all? That sounds a little bit too simple... and that's supposing we'll only see five junctions." Dean shakes his head, but the confidence Kash has in this is pretty high.

"Well, unless you can come up with a better idea, fool."

"..." Dean obviously dislikes being called that, by what she can see on his face, but it also seems like he cannot do any better. "Fine then... If we die because of this, I''ll slap your face 1000 times when we see each other again in Hell."

Kash simply replies by raising a middle finger to him.

"So, we're taking the middle for this one?" Brenda asks, while trying to break off the tension between Kash and Dean. "Then it's settled. Let's go, guys."

Brenda leads the way this time, with Kash and Dean on her left and right. The hearts of all three of them beats fast, wondering what kind of trap or monster you'll encounter, but by the time they reach the third junction, nothing threatening is in sight yet.

"What a lousy clue that was..." Dean lowers his weapon after being on guard since they choose the War path and Death path, and breathes deeply in an unadmitting relief.

"In fact, too lousy for your intelligence." Kash lowers her gun as well. Offended by what she said, Dean faces her, irritated.

"That's it, gangsta bitch. I've had it with your trash-talking."

"Likewise with your sad attempts at being witty, asshole."

Dean grabs the neck of Kash's shirt after she finishes. She reacts by doing the same to his necktied collar. Both his eyes and hers look deep into each other in hatred. Brenda only shakes her head as she looks at the face-off.

"Don't think I'd go easy on you for being a woman."

"Go any way you like, 'cause you'll get cho' ass kicked all the same."

"OH YEAH!? YOU WANNA FIGHT RIGHT HERE HUH!?" Dean throws down his gun.

"JUST BRING IT, asshole!!" Kash throws down hers as well. Her fist and Dean's are up and ready to go, only to come to a pause when they suddenly hear moans from a distance.

"Knock it off, you two!!" Brenda pushes her and Dean apart from each other. "We should just get out of here!!"

She immediately takes her gun back as the moans grow louder at an alarming rate, giving them a hint of just how strangely quick the zombies are catching up to them. Dean also picks his weapon back while Brenda flashes her M9 around the ground to find the engraving that would lead to the next correct route, which is now supposed to be Famine according to Kash.

"I'll get you, next time." Dean aims his gun around while looking at Kash. Once again, she only replies to him by raising her middle finger.

All of them continue to run through the third passage. With Dean leading the way this time and Brenda between her and him, she tries not to inhale too much rotten stench which gradually grows as time passes. Hunger and thirst begin to affect their speed, and Kash's legs are starting to feel weak. She can see Dean and Brenda experiencing the same condition too. By the time they reach the fourth junction, Dean decides to stop.

"Wait...!" Dean bends down while holding both of his knees, desperately catching breath. Brenda's breathing comes to the point of being shallow while she leans on the wall. Kash's lungs also feel like they are critically low in oxygen, but the increasingly loud moans prompts them to keep steady with the gun aimed and prepared to fire.

The moment her eyes begin to catch the presence of a monster, Kash fires her gun twice. Both seems to have hit its body, but then she notices that it continues to march forward with its hands lifted up, revealing its claws. The flashlight showers on it brighter as it gets closer to her, and when she notice that its a red-headed type of zombie, her heart begins to race.

"Crimson... Heads!!" Dean begins to point his gun as well, with his mouth still open wide to allow more air into him. Moments later, his eyes also widens. "And more coming?!"

Kash fires her gun three times at the one at the most front, all of which seem to home right into the head and crushes parts of it, causing it to fall into its indefinite death. Dean begins to shoot with his gun as well towards another one, although only two slams its brain and does little to slow it down. This is when Kash feels Brenda coming from behind.

"GET DOWN!" Kash and Dean crouches to her command. All she can see after that is just the Crimson Head's legs, then she can hear Brenda's scream and the sound of a shotgun blast, which instantaneously explodes with a flash. When the clawed zombie lays its headless body on the ground and both of them stand up again, the woman can see her sitting on the ground, probably because she fell due to the shotgun's recoil and her own fear, but with relief in her face. "I did it..."

"Thanks, Brenda." Dean is still looking at the path which they came from. "Now, we gotta go before we have to deal with more of them!"

"C'mon." Kash sticks out her hand to Brenda. When she grabs it with her left hand, the woman pulls her up and all of them resume their marathon of life and death through the Pestilence path. By the time they reach a steel door at the end of the second Death path, Kash falls on her knees from fatigue. Brenda is on all fours, again with shallow breathing.

"...Someone... help me out here...!!" Dean is grabbing the steel door's knob as he is pushing. From the way he is turning it, she can see that it is not locked, but it seems to be blocked by an obstacle. She and Brenda go and aid him to give enough strength to open the door.

"They're... they're coming...!"

"Don't... look back, Brenda!! Just keep... ugh... pushing!!" Kash warns the girl so as not to be distracted by what all of them need to do. Yet she herself, even after facing such situation many times, feels like she may snap at any moment from the danger that inches closer to their lives. During this, flashes of unknown memories she had earlier comes again, this time with better clarity: she can almost smell the ocean and the taste of lunch by the beach underneath a parasol as she sits in front of an unknown man. Then, her mind shifts to an urban location at night, secluded behind the buildings in a dirty side street, and an image of a different man, wearing shades and wears everything black which is quite distinct, if not weird, for a fashion.

"This should be enough. Now let's go!!" Dean's yell halts the memories' invasion of her consciousness. The door is not completely open, but the opening seems just enough to let them pass through one by one. After Dean gets in first, Kash pushes Brenda to make the girl pass before her. When it is her turn, she takes her time to fire the rest of her gun's ammunition into an oncoming Crimson Head first before she slides through the opening. The claws of several more Crimson Heads are so close to her skin before she manages to completely go to the other side. Seconds later, the clawed hands all sticks out from the opening. She can see now that a few corpse in police uniform is lying against the door, adding extra weight to the otherwise manageable decorated silver door.

"...Thankfully they're too stupid to slide through." Dean stores his gun back into the holster and grabs the rifle.

Kash does not really hear what he said though, but instead blankly staring at the Crimson Head's hands. The memories, although unknown, feel familiar, and strangely she is also terrified. It is a different kind of fear, in a seperate plain from the fear of blood and flesh, of death. She wants to believe that the flashes are the memories of the woman who originally owned her current body. Something inside her however is making her feel otherwise.

"Kash...? Are you alright...?" Brenda taps the woman's shoulder, and she jerks a little from the surprise and points the gun in her direction. Undoubtedly she is the one who gets surprised now, but she lowers her gun slowly at the sight of her face.

"I was gonna blow your cute ass away, bitch." Dean's right hand is in a gesture as if getting ready to aim and fire his gun at Kash as he says it.

"...Sorry... My head is..." She walks slowly ahead of them, holding her forehead.

"Can't say it? Alright. "Your head is fucked up."" Dean smirks in the hope for getting an annoyed response from her, but she keeps moving on. She wants to know the truth. Along with survival, it is the only drive she has which brought her this far. But with the constant flashes of memories which seem to bring her closer to it, she starts to hesitate if she really wants the truth.

"Kash...?"

"Let's just go... I'm sick of this place."

"Wait a sec, hot shot." She turns around to see Dean examining the corpse near the door. She points her flashlight to see him clearly, and she see blood splattered on the door. "They died pretty recently."

"Ya know, you should get away from those corpses. I ain't letting any zombies kill you before _I_ do."

"As if... Anyhow, they died from gunshots."

"Huh...?" Brenda gets closer to him. Kash does the same to make sure. With her flashlight illuminating the three corpses laying there, the woman can see holes on their heads. When she points her flashlight at Dean opening up one of the corpses' bloody shirt, she can see more holes. Indeed, they are not artefacts, but wounds caused by a small projectile, ie. of which fired from a gun. All that causes a phrase to emerge into her mind.

"NATO...?"

"...Are you really just a high-school kid?" Dean stares at Kash briefly before he returns to the corpses. He moves a corpse to make it lay on its back and examines the exit wounds. She can see that they are nearly as large as an orange fruit. "Anyway, your guess is just as good as mine. Someone fired at them with .308 Winchester rounds A.K.A. 7.62 x 51 NATO, the type of ammunition our state prohibits from civilian use."

"Which means that whoever did this either possessed the weapon illegally or..."

"...one of my co-workers are involved." The statement only further raises her suspicion towards him, and vice versa.

"C'mon guys!" Brenda who is still staring at the hands of the desperately trying Crimson Heads are already several foot away from the both of them.

All of them continue their way into a three-foot hole on a wall, which leads them into the sewers. As soon as she lands, Kash notices that the only way forward is up a ladder to a manhole, since the doors to the left and the right path, separated by bars, have been welded shut. When they go up through the manhole and come back to surface, she realizes that they are now in a narrow alleyway.

It is by no means a smooth-sailing from here however. Both paths are tightly inhabited by creatures. To their left are three groups of zombies, each having four of five zombies munching on their dinner. Somewhere between them, Kash can see a small firearm with a magazine sticking out. There are at least three more magazines lying around it. Not so far to her right is a mixed crowd of Drain Deimoses and one handful of creatures they have never seen before which are literally suspended on the wall, like Spiderman. Their brains are exposed, their bodies seem to be made of just blood red muscles, and once in a while they would stick out their narrow but long tongues. In between them is a large drum, with 'gas bomb #17' written on it, and two boxes that looks like it contain ammunition.

"Shh...!" Dean signals Kash to keep quiet when he sees the right path. Still ascending the ladder, he now does it slowly. When all of them are up, he talks to the woman in low voice in reference to the red Spidermen. "Those are lickers. Supposedly they rely heavily on sound, so shut up while they're around."

"You can't shut me up. I'll cuss you even if I have to whisper them out!"

"Bitch..."

"So, we're supposed to be close to the station, right?" Brenda talks to Dean while scratching the area around her bitten arm.

"Yes. I think the way over there is the shortest way around." Dean points to the path infested with Drain Deimoses and Lickers.

Kash remembers this area now. Not very far from here is the Mayor's residence, and the police station is a few blocks away. Things should be easier once they get out of this alleyway and into the main road, provided that there are no barricades. The problem at hand however is which path to take before they can get to it...

"...Dean, Brenda... Get back into the manhole for a moment." Kash's eyes are looking at the gas drum. Several Drain Deimoses are idling around it, while the Lickers are spread a little bit farther, near the fluorescent light shining down on the drum.

"What the..." Dean figures out what she has in mind. "You're not seriously going to do this, are you?"

She keeps the flashlight and take out the lighter in her pocket and flip the cover open. "I have doubts myself, but I can't think of another way. Can _you_, smartass?."

"Hmph..."

He signals Brenda to go back into the manhole first. She gazes at Kash with worry, all the way until she lose sight of the woman as she descends. Dean follows suit. After that, Kash stands by the hole and reloads her shotgun. Then she takes out the two bullets remaining on one clip and combine it with another to have four handgun bullets remaining and reloads her USP with it. Finally after taking a deep breath, she lights the lighter up and throw it. The wind-resistant lighter's flame stays on even after it falls and slides right next to the oil drum, producing a sound that pulls the attention of the lickers to it.

She then hastily goes down the manhole. When her chest levels with the surface, she fires her gun to make a hole just above the lighter. The lickers instantly react to the noise from her shot, but the liquid petrol which leaked from the drum already catches on fire. She jumps off the manhole ladder, and before she lands on the sewer floor, they all hear a loud explosion.

"Eargh...! My ears!!" Dean, who is ducking down with both of his hands on the back of his head, like Brenda, gets up and dig his ear with his finger.

"Hurry up, God damn it!! We gotta go now!!" Kash immediately climbs the manhole ladder back, ignoring a burning piece of a Drain Deimos' leg falling from the top. When she resurface, she can see the right path with the gas drum is littered with flames, some are barbecueing the remains of the freaks caught in the explosion. Thankfully, the flames left are not so severe, and she simply runs through them. Past the flames, she opens up the green ammunition boxes she saw earlier in the hope that she can replenish her supply.

She does not find any ammunition that seems to match her weapons. Instead, she gets herself over 30 hollow-pointed bullets that feel longer than any she used so far.

"Hey! That's a bunch of .357 Magnums!" Dean shows up from her back and crouches beside you. "Brenda! You still have your revolver, right?!"

"Uh... yeah..." Brenda stands between Kash and Dean.

"Magnum? ...Like in Dirty Harry movies!? THEN THIS IS THA SHIT!!" Despite the fact that the gun chambered for these cartridges currently belongs to Brenda, her morale raises a bit. She clumsily grabs them and put them inside her waist pouch. When she has six left in her hand, she wants to give them to Brenda so the girl can load them immediately, but then she hears the moans again. "Gah... fucking zombies spoiling my mood...!"

All of them run through the fluorescent-lighted alleyway into the main road. Once they reach it, they come to a sight identical to the part of the town they arrived earlier that day: broken cars, broken shops and other buildings all splattered with blood, broken and bitten bodies, and flesh eating zombies. This time however, it feels scarier due to night time, with some of the broken road lights allowing darkness to blanket the path to their right. Thankfully, she knows that the path to the station is on her left instead. This one is heavily barricaded with steel fences, both the police's and makeshift. Behind them, Kash can see two police officers. One of them is talking on a walkie-talkie; proof enough that they are living beings.

"HEY!! OVER HERE!!" She runs towards them. Instinctively, they draw their weapons on her, but she keeps yours and raise her hands in the air. "Now wait! I'm no zombie!"

Very shortly after, Dean and Brenda also emerges from the alleyway. One of the officers recognize Dean. "Detective Jaeger...?"

"Alive and still with civilized appetite."

The officer with the walkie-talkie operates it again. "...We found more survivors. I repeat: we found more survivors."

---

The noise from outside the precinct is muffled by the distance and the surrounding walls of the room, all messy with shelves and a pink crate haphazardly place in the middle. Alone, Kash is sitting on the floor with her back on the wall, her knees up and her arms resting above them as she remains in a blank stare on the wooden tiles.

Over half an hour ago, she came to this place, known as the Secretary's room on the second floor of the department. When she first arrived at the tent set just outside the station's gate, she sees Brenda running in tears toward her parents who happens to be one of the several hundreds of survivors who find refuge here. The moving sight gave hope to Kash; that her own parents might still be alive, so she frantically searched for them around the tent.

After failing to do so, she came here to meet an officer who she were told is responsible for keeping the list of survivors. Unfortunately, he gave her a news she rather not hear; they are confirmed dead. Katherine(43), Moses(20) and Zoe Kash(14), her mother, brother and sister respectively; were caught in a crowd of zombies on one of the main streets the cops had to blow up. Her father, Gerard Kash, who told this to the officer, was killed by zombies after he volunteered to go through the alleyways to set off the gas drums. She figures that there is a big possibility that the alleyway they emerged from earlier could have been where he died.

"...Kash...?" She looks up to see Brenda, standing in the doorframe. The crawling sensation of her tears as they move down on the surface of her cheek prompts her to wipe it off with her sleeve. She sniffs as her nose becomes wet from a gush of emotions. "I was wondering where you are, so..."

"Brenda..." Kash tries to smile at the girl, but she can feel her watery eyes. "Your family's still alive. I'm happy for you."

"Well, my twin's missing..." She slowly walks on to Kash and sits beside the woman.

"You have a twin?"

"Yeah... And with the current situation, the cops are considering her as good as dead."

"Sorry to hear that..."

"But you know what? I wanna be optimistic, like you told me to. Who knows... maybe someone is protecting her as we speak, like the way you protected me."

"I wish I can think the same way." Kash returns to her blank stare on the floor. "Ya know what? Ma' whole family's dead."

"What...?!"

"Ya heard me, and it's been confirmed." Her voice becomes distorded. She tries to hold in the tears. "I thought I'd be prepared for it but man... to be told to ma' face that the motherfucking zombies chewed their body apart from their souls..."

Brenda only looks on to her without saying a word.

"Now I can only think... 'God, what did we ever do to deserve all this?' I mean, Pops might not always be at home, because he had to drive buses to Iowa and back, but he always spend time with us whenever he can. Mom's just an ordinary housewife. Ma' big brother only cared about animes and ma' little sister was working hard from school to become a doctor. And me... though you hear me cuss a lot now, I actually dream of being a cuss-free rapper, like Will Smith." She chuckles in self defeat. "We never really bothered anyone..."

She can feel Brenda's hand on her shoulder. Yet she only looks up and close her eyes with her palm before she rests her head down.

"Sorry but... I feel like being alone for a while."

"...O.K...." Brenda keeps her hand on the woman's shoulder until she fully stands up. "Anyway, Officer Branagh asked me to remind you that we can't be alone anywhere in here for too long."

"Gotcha..." It was a weak reply. As the sound of Brenda's footsteps fade, the intensity of her emotions builds up. Not long after that, the floodgate to her tears opens wide, and they shed down with a force that her heart cannot withstand. Then, she simply let her emotions take over, and she begins to cry the hardest in her recent life. Not even her hand can hold back her tears, as they make only make it wet, and they seep out. Her chest tightens as she sobs, unable to press the tears in.


	8. Chapter 8: An Obvious Yet Complicated De

Chapter 8: **An Obvious Yet Complicated Decision**

"Pathetic..."

Kash does not know how much time has passed until then. Her vision is distorted by the tears pooling in her eyes, but she can still recognize the person. It's that woman again.

"...Then again, you evolve from a mere fragment of awareness into a genuine consciousness complete with your own emotions and abilities. I myself wouldn't have been able to solve those weird puzzles down the labyrinth."

Instantly, her sadness turns into pure anger and rage, causing her to draw her gun immediately with nothing more in her mind but the need to blast that annoying smirk off the other woman's face. Even though that woman also draws her own gun and puts both of them into deadlock, Kash's trigger finger has never been more demanding to shoot.

"You come in here just to go Yoda on me again?" Kash's eyes delve into her. Her mourning hands are slightly shaking, but unlike her, the other is calm enough to keep her gun steady on Kash. "I don't care about answers anymore. I'll kill you right here and now."

The woman laughs.

"LAUGH ANYMORE AND I WILL FUCK YOU UP!!!"

"Let's see you try then." She raises both of her arms, mockingly inviting Kash to shoot her.

Kash fires the gun once to her head. The muzzle flash and the noise is there, but shockingly, her head remains intact, as if the bullet simply went _through_. Although Kash does not know that much about firearms, she is sure that neither of the bullets Dean gave her are blanks, too. "What the...!?"

"Ahahahahahahahahah. You still don't get it, do you?." She points her gun at Kash again. "You can't shoot me, but _I_ can shoot you."

She fires to Kash's chest. The woman looks on her shirt to see red liquid coming out from the hole the shot made on the position of her heart. Not long after that, excruciating pain comes in, and rhymes with her escalating heartbeat. Her shirt quickly becomes wet with her own blood, and it hurts just to keep breathing. Her body falls and leans on the floor, and the barely lit room feels darker and darker until there is nothing to see, and nothing to feel.

Suddenly, Kash can feel her arm being shaken by someone. When this happens, she opens her eyes and realize that she can see again, and Brenda kneeling beside, yelling at her. She also sees a police officer with a darker blue RPD uniform with her.

"Get up!! Kash!! Please, get up!!"

"Brenda...?" Kash gets up to sit against the wall again. She feels no pain, which makes her take a look at her shirt. No blood, no hole, nothing.

"We heard gunfire, so I thought there's a zombie here..." The officer explains to Kash.

"What about that woman...?"

Brenda tilts her head in confusion while the officer only sighs.

"What woman? Brenda and I was talking at the registration desk near the ladder, and no one went up."

"...A dream...?" She tries to make sense to herself. However, that feeling of excruciating pain was too real to dismiss as a mere nightmare. She is also confident that she was awake the whole time.

"Dude... next time, turn your gun's safety on." He sighs again. Then Kash notices him eyeing on her gun. "Hey, where did you get your USP?"

"...Mr. Woods gave this to me."

"Kirk Woods!? He's still alive!?"

"...He was alive..."

"I see..." He makes a gesture to tell her to give it to him. She hands the gun over.

"You know Woods?" Brenda asks while she stands up.

"Yeah... He used to be a cop here." The officer takes a close look at her gun, as if he is analyzing. "If he wasn't, there's no way he'd be able to get his hands on this monster of a gun."

Kash's intuition gets sparked upon mentioning the word 'monster', not really because of Kevin's relation to the gun, but she cannot figure out what it is.

"Monster? No wonder you've been really good at shooting, Kash." Brenda gets closer to the gun Kevin is holding to see for herself.

"A gun doesn't really do jack for anyone if he or she can't hit anything, but the fact that USP45s are heavy also kinda means that it also helps to stabilize aiming. Then again, it doesn't fit my taste, so I use my own customized M1911 to fire .45s."

"I don't know anything about guns, except what Kash told me… She's the better shooter in our group."

"Really, Brenda?"

Damn right – Kash yells in her heart. It might have been a cool thing for her to brag about, but she dislikes the fact that the ability may have been 'lent', or descended to her simply because she is now a 'she'; A regular teenager somehow disturbingly switched bodies with some bitch she does not know, some bitch who seems like she has done so many bad things.

"Kevin, what happened?" An African-American officer shows up by the door frame.

"Nothing, Marvin. Just a little misunderstanding."

"Is that so?" Marvin raises an eyebrow. Kevin only replies with a 'heh'. He then looks at Kash. "Be careful with the guns. Just because we're allowing civilians to carry weapons doesn't mean you can fire that thing carelessly."

"I'm sorry, officer."

Marvin then disappears behind the wall. Meanwhile, Kevin returns Kash's gun to her. He also searches inside his pants pockets to take out some bullets and gives them to her.

"I still have some spare .45s. You can have it."

"But hey... Don'tcha..." Kash hesitantly takes eight .45 ACP bullets from him.

"Don't worry. Just take it." Kevin turns his back on you. "Us cops should be protecting the people of this town, but truth be told, we're useless in this crisis. The best thing everyone should do is to look out for ourselves."

Kevin leaves the room as you stand up, with your eyes tailing on him until he is out of your view. Brenda silently looks on to you while occasionally scratching her arm, as if she is trying to say something, but she stays that way even until you pick up your shotgun from the top of the pink crate. You cannot find a word to speak either. Both of you go out of the room and down to the ground floor with the emergency ladder.

"…I'mma go and find that guy in charge of survivors' list." Kash tells Brenda, even though the woman is looking away from her. "I wanna ask him some more about ma' family."

"I understand." Brenda gets in front of the woman's face to look at her, eye to eye, but Kash only switches her attention into another direction. "I'll be around the tent outside."

Brenda walks off, away from her. After a few steps, she looks on to the girl, and how she keeps on holding to the bitten side of her arm. When she disappears behind the door out, Kash turns around to see Dean, leaning by his waist against the inner side of the front desk.

"You act all tough and 'gangsta' outside, but inside you're surprisingly fragile."

"…I'm in no mood for your insults right now, as Mary Sue as everything's making me become…" Still a bit tired and in need of sleep, Kash said it with a weak voice, and Dean understands that.

"Not really an insult."

"…Your point being…?"

"Just sayin'."

"Well, you seem incredibly composed."

"I'm just fortunate that I still have my wife and kids. My ex-wife and kids anyway but maybe that explains it."

"…I ain't trying to be tough. Like every other kids, of course there was a time when I wanted to, but…" Dean gazes at Kash, while she puts her mind and eyes in another direction. "It's different, now. The things we're seeing out of this outbreak made me wish that I can just lock ma' self away in some place and wait until this shit's over. Then again, I know I won't get back to ma' family if I do that, so I took the fuck-all attitude and push ma' self to weave through everything. Now that ma' family's dead…"

"You have relatives, right? Besides, your parents would have wanted you to continue with your life…"

"IT WON'T BE THE SAME AGAIN!"

Dean's gaze continues, though he still goes on to type something into the computer, and Kash stays where she stood, staring into space.

"It won't be the same again, man…"

They both remain that way for a time. Only the sound of the keyboard and the muffled noise from the crowd outside the station surrounds them. Several officers and civilians around the lobby who turned their heads upon Kash's yell looked on to them for a while.

"I better find that guy with the list…"

"Wait up, Kash."

Dean sits on the cushioned chair besides him and positions himself right in front of the computer. His eyes are alternating between the monitor and Kash's face. The woman, still not figuring out what he wants, gets closer to the desk.

"So you're supposed to be Shaun…"

"Shaun Marshall Kash. That's my full name."

"Parents?"

"Gerard and Katherine."

"Closest relative?"

"Thomas Kash and Patricia Pi…" She tilts her head, abruptly ending the her line. "Hold on. Whaddaya want here?!"

"I'm trying to see if there's some truth to that crazy shit you told me back in the labyrinth."

After a series of questionnaires regarding Kash's family, Dean leans his back on the chair and makes a sigh. He holds his forehead, as if refusing to believe what he sees on the monitor.

"How come the cops keep my family's records? You folks are still at us blacks simply because we're blacks?"

"Aren't you the bleeding heart anti white supremacist…" His eyes watch every inch of Kash's body, holding in his laugh. "Though you're no longer black… and also no longer a dude to boot."

"What the-!? You think this shit's funny!?"

"Anyway…" Dean looks behind him, towards the officers walking around. He rotates the monitor a bit as to obscure their view to what is displayed on it. "No, we are not watching every black family in town. I just happened to be privileged at that."

"…You can hack?" She eyes him in disbelief, not really because it is something even regular cops should not do, but rather because she did not expect him, of all people, to have such skill.

"More like script kiddy, but I'm getting there." Dean smirks in satisfaction for himself.

Kash reaches out to the monitor and turns it just enough so she can see what Dean got as well. Apparently, he forced his way into the database owned by SpeedStrip Transportations, a company her father, Gerard worked under.

"Not that I'm taking your story in completely. Either way it still doesn't make much sense."

"Neither is this zombie outbreak…"

"Right, which is why I have a small bit of belief in what you said. You might be either making a charade or lost a few screws in your head from the outbreak, but I felt compelled to give you this."

"Give what?"

"Wait a moment. I'm accessing it." She looks at the monitor. The sounds of the keyboard being type can be heard as numbers and letters that serve functions oblivious to her show up in a small black window inside the monitor. Texts after texts scroll up until another window opens up, showing a document-like file complete with a picture.

The picture makes Kash gasp. It is the picture of her current self, only that the name described in the document - a form for temporary residence for Raccoon University - which is different.

"'Ada… Wong'…?"

"Turns out you're… what do they call it…? 'A.Z.N.'?" Dean playfully refers to 'Ada Wong''s American nationality. "My friend, who worked on the investigation for murders of two Raccoon University professors, e-mailed me this with a note saying that this woman is the connection between Umbrella Incorporated and the motive for the murders, but he said he hadn't figured it out."

"…So that woman really is a…"

"I won't go that far yet. There are actually a few more suspects, all with relevant motives to get involved in the murders, but then this outbreak started and my friend got killed in action before I could ask him further."

"So, who are the other suspects?"

"Michael Warren, William Birkin, and…" Dean looks around him for a moment, making sure that no one else is close enough to hear what he is about to say. "Chief Brian Irons, our own boss."

"Huh!?"

"Now here's the deal." He pauses for a few seconds; perhaps having doubts himself, before he says it anyway. "You confront the Chief, see if he recognizes you, and then draw information from him about what the other you is doing here and find out what's he gotta do with the whole thing."

"How am I supposed to do that…!? Don't you think it would be weird to him that I'm asking about what he thinks _I_ am doing…!?"

"By acting it out, of course. Ditch that ghetto talk for a moment and say it like a lady."

"Oh fuck you." Despite being in a woman's body for over 18 hours, Kash's ego is still too thick to agree with his plan.

"Listen. I get to help solve a dead friend's suspended case and you get to know more about your own situation. Besides, the Chief might be the only witness to the case that is still alive."

Kash gets Dean's point. However, with everything that happened around her, her heart begins to be shrouded with doubt. She clenches her fist, trying to bring herself together as she silently looks on the floor with gritted teeth. As her fists loosen, so is her will to go on.

"…Brenda's already here with her family, so I have nothing left to take care of."

Dean sighs. Kash takes out the holster holding her handgun and magazines, along with the waist pouch. Along with all the spare ammunition she holds in her pockets, she put them all onto the table.

"There isn't much more to learn, other than me fated to get fucked up. I'mma rest my case."

"Well then… I have no choice." Dean revolves himself with the chair, with his back now on her. "I gotta tell them that I have a suspect wanted for murder under my custody…"

"…You're blackmailing me…!?" Kash looks furiously at Dean's direction. "I'm still trying to cope with shit and you're pulling this off now!?"

"I'm a cop." He stands up and turns his head slightly to look Kash. Contrary to the indifferent face he had been putting on until now, he tries to tell her how serious he is on the whole affair. "I'm also a friend, a husband and a father. Umbrella, Chief Bitter Irony, and now, _you_, all have connections to this outbreak. I have to find out the truth about it and how to put an end to it. Surely you can try to understand my resolve and all the things at stake here."

Kash still thinks it will all be for naught. To her, anything they might find out after this still has no meaning. The outbreak is already closing in to a critical stage, too many people are infected and more are either dying or becoming undead. How was she, a high-school kid until a few hours ago, and a single detective seemingly out to avenge his friend's death, can make a difference is out of her comprehension.

"You've seen it yourself, down at the sewer exit." Dean refers to the shot bodies they found after exiting the labyrinth. "Whatever stupid fate that they might have actually fall into, there's still a chance that another police officer is involved. Now, make a pick; Take back your gun and help me and yourself get to the bottom of this, or mope all day without knowing anything and getting yourself convicted for a murder you didn't commit."

Kash's intuition flares out, telling her not to. Both her eyes and Dean's stare into each other, trying to intimidate the opposite side into their own cause. All she has to do to say 'No' is walk off and leave. It is just two of them against the authority and circumstance – an impossibly unfair match – and she was certain there is no way they can win.

She clenches her fists as she arrives into the difficult decision.


	9. Chapter 9 Conversation With A Maniac

Chapter 9 **~ Conversation With A Maniac  
**

The USP in Kash's hand felt heavier than it should. Crouching and leaning against the wall outside the secretary's room holding the gun, she will have to carry it again to help Dean avenge his friend. She agreed to him just 20 minutes ago, when she felt a strong impulse of not being associated with a cold-blooded assassin bitch and accused of crimes she did not do, but she could not see how anyone would want to deliberately throw themselves right into the middle of this mess to avenge one friend. She feels that it was not fair of Dean to blackmail her into this when everyone else is losing their own loved ones to the grosteque zombies and mutated creatures, including her entire family.

"...You know, I don't think what I'm doing to you is a totally good thing." Kash looks to her side to find Dean, who she was too deep in thought to notice. Despite his gradually nicer words, her impression of him did not improve one bit.

She stands up, quickly clenches her fist firm and swings a fast one to his left cheek with all her might, and fury. It was enough to send Dean a step back and a little dizzy. He shakes his head a bit.

"Shut the fuck up and don't pretend like you give a fuck about me." Her eyes were going to shed a tear again, but she is too angry to let it happen. "You want my help? You got it. Just make it quick."

"Well, your bigger guns and ammo are all in the crate now..." He spits out some blood from his mouth. "Like I said earlier, we can't look too much like a threat to him, so we're only carrying small firearms. If you want to feel better, I have a spare knife..."

"No thanks. These hard-ass boots are all the melee I need."

"Heh..."

"But I ain't putting the safety off, in case I still need to cap his ass."

"I don't think he's that observant, but whatever."

They walk out of the room into the hallway leading to Raccoon City Police Department chief Lt. Brian Irons. Contrary to the concrete-and-cement walkways they have been walking on in other areas, this hallway is paved with dark brown wood which feels very hard. There are also some decor on the ceiling and lower side of the walls. Kash is no expert in interior decoration, but she knows enough to tell that these things do not come cheap. Yet, they somehow do not look appropriate for a police station.

It is a gloomy hallway however, and although it is windowless, she can still hear moans of zombies from outside. Several patches of dried bloodstains are clearly visible in certain spots. Perhaps there was a point during the start of the outbreak that zombies broke in this far into the station, or several cops themselves turned to zombies and wreaked havoc. She did not really take it seriously when Officer Branaugh told her that nowhere in this station is completely safe, but now she understands.

Dean stops at the second door before the dead end. The gold placard lost a nail and was misplaced, but the name 'Lt. Brian Irons' is clearly engraved in it.

"Now, neither of us knows who Ada Wong really is and how she behaves, but how he talks to you can help you guess how she usually communicates with him. Start with simple, mundane questions first and with some luck, he would be telling YOU who she is too."

Kash looks at him with an eyebrow raised. "I don't like your confidence. You say it as if it's as easy as breathing."

"It's called crime intelligence. It helped me bust a human trafficking syndicate once so of course I'm confident with it."

"Bullshit... We're facing a cop himself." She combs her hair up with her fingers while Dean only shakes his head. "You're not wiring me up or something? Don't you cops have that bug thingy?"

"We do, but I can't access that kind of equipment now. If we get out of this alive, I may have to call you to court as a prosecution witness." He holds his forehead as he explains. "That's assuming we can't get any incriminating evidence based on what you can dig out of him, which I think you can."

"If all else fail?"

"I'll just put a bullet between his eyes. The reason I'm dragging him to court is mainly for compensation for the families of his own subordinates which he killed himself. If I can't accomplish that, there's no point in letting him stay alive."

Hearing the word 'families' somewhat increased her morale, but the whole scheme still sounds unprofessional for a police officer to her. "Here I thought you're trying to uphold the law, but this is just crying revenge if I ever saw it."

"I'm letting a prime suspect for murder walk around with loaded guns. You should've figured that out from the start." Dean walks away from her into a corner when he stops for one last time. "I'll keep on the lookout here. Just try not to make him feel intimidated or angry, because he's got paper-thin temper."

Kash sees him disappear from her view before she faces the door again. With a deep breath, she slowly turns the knob and pull the door open. Cold breeze from air conditioning sweeps into her face as she does so, and she can see another door at the end of the short hallway to her left. She walks into that short, awfully dim hallway and closes the door behind her. Weird for her to feel the air-conditioning turned down this low, even if it is summer.

She approaches the other door slowly, keeping the noise of her footsteps down to gentle slaps against the wooden floor. She was going to knock the door first when she heard an dreadfully eerie laugh.

"Heehee... heheheheheeheheheeeee..."

She opens the door about halfway through when she sees a man with thick moustache immediately drawing his hunting rifle towards her, with one small white cloth in his left hand. His build is slightly overweight, wearing a black pair of slacks with white t-shirt and a gray vest. A box of ammunition can be seen on a table opposite of the sofa where he is sitting. Both of them stays frozen in each other's stance until the man lowers his rifle.

"Oh my, I did not expect to have the slut in the red dress to pay me a visit. I apologize for the lack of any drinks to serve you, Ada."

He rests his rifle on his lap. The strokes he make on the barrel as he wipes them to a visible shine are like that of a fetishist. The delighted look on his face disgusts Kash. She enters the room and closes the door back, shut. The name 'Ada' has triggered her attention.

"You look awfully beat. Strange, because I had this impression that you always have to look like a whore in all situations. First time I'm seeing you in clothes that is not red in color."

Irons' words resonate with the way Kash first woke up in the school. It is now apparent to Kash that Ada Wong has a flamboyant sense of style, despite the kind of situations she puts herself in.

"Nothing left for you to get your hands on in this city anymore. Umbrella's decided to just scrap my town like it was nothing. Oh, all the things I've done for them..."

Kash's eyes were occupied on the things in that room: Taxidermies, lush cabinets filled with philosophical books, statues and expensive furnitures line side-by-side. It baffles her mind to see a high-ranking officer of a law enforcement agency able to stock his room up with such things, and in a government building no less. "Scrap you say?"

"Make it sounds like we're all but Legos and paper blocks, don't you think? Just shove everything aside and throw them into the fire. Oh, and did I just say 'fire'? Because the imbeciles in the Congress has already passed the motion to nuke Raccoon City."

"They're nuking this place? Even with all the civilians still alive?"

"YES THEY WOULD AND THEY WILL!" He slams the mahogany table, speaking each word almost seperately and loudly. Several rifle rounds roll away and fall to the carpeted floor from the force. "The army already barricaded all exits and they shoot anyone from inside the town."

"Wait, no one knows about this?"

"Why are you so surprised?" He gets up, still holding his rifle and walks towards you. "You of all people should know, having done deals with me all these years. YOU called me a crazy posh dysfunctional maniac once. I'm just... being true to what you said!"

Kash gets it now. He deliberately enforced a media blackout to bring everyone to miserable deaths along with him. It also seems like they have had business arrangements with each other. Perhaps the majority of all the expensive stuff she saw up to this point were gifts to either shut the department up against Ada Wong's dealings as well as Umbrella's. Being a maniac with expensive taste for antiques, Irons may have been serving both Umbrella's side and another entity, which Wong seems to be affiliated to.

"Their... their zombies that they unleashed from Hell is literally eating my town and that is their final gift to me after everything I've done for them. Don't you think that's... unfair...?" His voice gets slower as he inches closer to Kash. She can see that he is raising his rifle towards her. "I was just starting to enjoy the fruits of my labor. EVERYONE was enjoying the fruits of MY labor. It's only logical that they have to go down with me too, right, Ada?"

Kash begins to get nervous. Her hands are itching to grab the gun in the holster, but she knows she is the one at a disadvantage since Irons is aiming right at her.

"...Oh I almost forgot something." He turns around. Kash slowly sighs a relief. "I would've forgotten it completely if it weren't for your lewd body, but I need to continue my hunting session."

"Hunting? For zombies...?"

"PREPOSTOROUS!"

BANG!

He fires his rifle to the wall in a fit of rage. Apparently he still has enough composure not to hit a glass idol which missed the shot by less than an inch. By that moment, Kash also notices that no one is coming to check the noise from the gunfire, leading her to believe that the whole room could be soundproof.

"Why, would I want to hunt rotting animated corpses? I have this beautiful blonde dove I let loose into the sewers. She would have false hopes of escaping the city through there, but that hope will keep me entertained. No true hunter likes a static prey."

For a while there, Kash thought that he was referring to a human being. Granted, no one sane would be joyfully hunting for a dove during a zombie outbreak, but she thinks that the man is too many screws loose to think straight. As Iron continue his ramblings about molesting the 'dove' and 'planting his mark' into 'her' along various sexual innuendos, which she did not pay attention to, she thinks of the sewers that he claims is false hope for escape.

"So, no way out through the sewers?"

"No."

"You're so certain about it."

"Because I made sure that there will be none!" Irons' words brought her back to the corpses of police officers with bullet wounds. It is now almost certain that the two cops might have been killed by him. "The Organization told me to, so that Umbrella's spec ops team would find it more difficult to get out of there! I thought that's where you came in!"

"...Whatever you 'heard' about my mission is wrong." Kash raised an eyebrow when Irons mentioned 'The Organization'. She is not sure if that is really what Ada Wong was sent here for, but the information is valuble enough. She decides to bluff some more using the memory flashes and Brenda's story about Gene. "I'm here to procure Professor Oakley's material and send them back to Organization. I don't know a thing about whatever else they're planning."

"Pawns. That's you and me." He turns to look at her with a smirk. "Must be Umbrella...! They must have released those monsters from their labs to destroy my entire city just to stop the Organization! Those ingrates!"

"...Wait, what's the connection between these labs and the sewers?"

"They're all down there, fool!" Although she had a hint on this after reading Father Daniels' will in the catacombs, Kash is still surprised to know that Umbrella has indeed erected secret facilities underneath Raccoon City. "There's a secret entrance to the Main Research Lab which involves the sewers. We received information that Birkin was going against Umbrella's orders, and they sent some hitmen down under to kill him and retrieve the virus!"

Irons stares into one of his taxidermies. With a disappointed look on his face, he presses a button in a painting behind his desk, which opens a secret door from the wall next to the shelves. "Excuse me, Ada. I have some hunting to do. Consider all that information as my... gift."

"WAIT!" Irons stops, although he still could not bother to turn around and face her again. Meanwhile, Kash is trying to squeeze any clues that could shed light on any links between her and Ada Wong. "Do you know anything about Gerard Kash? Maybe his son Shaun Kash too?"

"That nigger who threw himself into a zombie horde? His sacrifice is admirable, but third-rate human beings are still third-rates."

Slow growl of anger leaks out of Kash's mouth upon Irons' unforgivingly racist remarks. She begins to contemplate killing him right there and then as she subconsciously reaches for her gun. She stopped short of unbuttoning it from its holster when flashes of blinding white light invades her vision once again.

"Are you mad? Mhmhmhmhmhmhmhm..." Irons turns his head to look at Kash, who is now holding her head as she begins to experience pressing headache. "You chinks are slightly better than niggers, I'll give you that. In fact, I won't mind giving you my precious seeds if I'm not occupied with this hunt, but chink whores like you would take it from anyone anyway."

Irons disappears from Kash's fading view when the secret door closes itself. With all her remaining strength, she drags her ailing body away on the floor as she tries to ignore the flashing white lights and noises that she cannot comprehend. When she hears a loud repeating knockings from the entrance door, she crawls towards it and with her last act of defiance against the illness taking over her, she pulls the knob to release the lock. She then once again faints.


	10. Chapter 10 Subject: Ada Wong

Chapter 10 **~ Subject: Ada Wong  
**

Pretty wooden ceiling is Kash's first sight when she opens her eyes. The long bench she is lying on creaks when she gets up, and creaks some more with each of her small movements. At the edge, close to where her head was, Brenda is leaning to the edge with her left arm to pillow her sleeping head. Her wounded right arm seems to have been bandaged anew, although there still seems to be large patch of blood staining it as if it never really stopped. On the other side of the wall, Dean is laying on the floor, also sleeping with his hands still grabbing his rifle. Kash looks to the small clock on the desk close to her. It is now 9:00 AM, or 31 hours since her life began to take a sudden turn into Hell. The bulge she can still see on her chest, the strangely vacant feeling in the crotch and the yellowish white skin, all prove that this Hell is not indeed a nightmare. It is real, and besides being 'Ada Wong' and learning more about the outbreak along with Wong's role, she still has no ideas, clues or leads as to what links herself with Wong or why.

Kash pulls the gun out of her holster to turn on the safety, which she could not when she collapsed in the chief's room. Her hands still feel weak however, and she lost grip of it, causing it to fall onto the floor. The sound of it wakes up Brenda and Dean.

"Morning, Kash..." Brenda tries to sit straight. She rubs her fingers into her barely opening eyes.

"Morning, Brenda." She looks into Brenda's eyes for a while, before pulling up her shirt's sleeves up and picks the fallen gun off the floor. "You didn't nurse me all night, did you?"

"No..." Brenda's eyes turns grief despite her smiling lips. "As usual, I can't do anything but cry and watch. Dean carried you up here."

"That I did." Dean stretches his hands up with his back arched. "You're damn heavy, you know that?"

"It's only small shit compared to what I did for you."

"Yeah yeah..."

According to Dean, Kash collapsed after unlocking the door, which Dean went through. When he carried her up and back to the secretary's room, he found Brenda waiting for them there. After Brenda insisted, Dean told her the entire story.

"You know, if you keep fainting like that, one of these days you might get us all killed." Dean turns to sit facing Kash. He takes out his Glock from the holster. Pulling the slide, he looks into the chamber to check for a loaded cartridge.

"To be clear, I used to be a healthy African-American teenage boy who goes to gym every Sunday and jog 6 miles twice a week." Kash looks to her side, disgusted with Dean's attitude after she risked her life to get information for him. "God knows what this body swapping shit is doing to me."

"'Pimpin' yourself up eh? What, your self-esteem is so terrible that you have to make a point by looking buff? Guess your dick was so small, that God decided to correct it and turn you straight into a woman?"

Dean's words and laughing should normally piss Kash off, but she can sense that Dean still is not buying her story completely. She glared sharply towards Dean, though she keeps herself silent.

"I'm really angry that you didn't tell me about all this, but I guess this has gotten really out of hand." Brenda interrupts; she sounds powerless, resolved in her words. Kash could not look at her face for some reason. The only thing that kept them together before is the simple need to survive the initial zombie onslaught, and even she thinks that their relationship should stop there.

"Your arm... how is it?"

"Mom rubbed loads of antiseptic and made me ate 11 antibiotic pills she stole somewhere in the last 8 hours. It still isn't getting any better, but at least it slows it down, I think..." Brenda stands up and walks towards the door outside. "My parents aren't taking this very well though. They think I'll get better, but I know it won't. I just know..."

Kash cannot find the comforting words to say either. The glimmer of hope she had for Brenda's recovery and for the news to be fake, she can feel is fading inside her heart. She moves her eyes towards Dean. "Do you have to know them all right now?"

"No." Kash is going to ask what she just risked her life for, but Dean continues. "After you went in, I noticed a bulge just above the side padding on the lower parts of the walls. Apparently, someone's been tapping the chief."

"Any idea who might?"

"If we're talking intent, almost everyone in here has it. When talking about motivation though, I think only Chris Redfield or Jill Valentine would."

Kash recognizes the two names. They were supposed to be the two survivors of the so called Arklay Mansion incident a few weeks before the start of the outbreak. The town papers suppressed their exact claims, but many people know what they were trying to tell: Man-made zombies being created for the purpose of biological warfare. It sounded so absurd back then, and most people only laughed it off before going back to their lives as usual.

"In any case, I improvised the cables and rigged them to my walkie talkie. I heard everything clear as day. Such a waste that I can't find a tape recorder though."

"Then you've got your share of information. Good for you." Kash lowers her head. Her teeth is locked in frustration. "And here I am still wonderin' what the hell do I have to do with this whole shit. What did that Ada Wong do to me? Why me...?"

"If I have to be frank, I honestly believe she picked the worst person to frame." Dean reaches for some papers and files from the desk and browses through them as he explains. "My friend couldn't dig enough into her personal data because she didn't have enough evidence to grant her a 'suspect' label and a search warrant. He can tell though that this is one high-maintenance woman who takes care of her words and manners."

"High-maintenance? I'mma stab my cock deep into her ass and give her a real maintenance. Bitch is REALLY pissing me off."

"You ain't got none now, nigga." Dean mocks Kash in her own accent. "...Well, my contact in the U.S. STRATCOM did tell me once that spies make real good actors, but heh, you sound every bit as 'gangsta' as every immature 16-year-old wannabe rappers."

"You tryin' to say that you believe in me? Because the way you put it is pissing me off, dirty-ass punk-ass cop." Brenda slaps her arm with a concerned look in her eyes, as if trying to tell her to watch her words. She ignores it.

"Sigh... the more you talk like that, the less intimidating you sound."

"Wanna take it outside? Fuckin' good-for-nothin' cop."

"Well, if you're going to push it, I WILL charge you for assault on a police officer. Try to behave and respect your elders a bit more. It'll make it easier for you to survive, you know?"

Both Kash and Dean are again locked in an angry stare and counter-stare. Brenda gets frustrated at the both of them.

"YOU ARE BOTH ARGUING LIKE CHILDREN!" Kash and Dean looks at Brenda, her face flushing red. "I want to know more about this Ada Wong person. She killed my boyfriend and I have some grudge I like to settle with her as well."

"...Alright, if you gotta dig that deep..."

Kash has an urge to stop Brenda from getting involved anymore than necessary, but she cannot open her mouth to tell the girl.

"She's supposed to be here on a business trip on behalf of Sanderson Consultancies Incorporated based in Washington, as an auditor employed to assess Raccoon University's management efficiency. In the initial interview by my friend relating to the murder of professor Chad Orwell, she claimed that it was Orwell who repeatedly approached her during the week before the audit to coerce her into granting him loose evaluations so they can win the ISO certification. However, Orwell's collegues from other departments have known about Orwell's dangerous and secretive research and said that Orwell was complaining to them about Wong insisting to audit their off-limits lab despite it not being within the original standard operating procedure the management handed them with.

On the night when he was hacked to death, Wong said she was working overtime in her room. CCTV recordings at the hotel she stayed in proved her alibi. Needless to say, she was removed from the list of suspects and the court wouldn't grant a search warrant for her.

As for the murder of Orwell's research partner Martin Oakley, she was jogging on the morning of the shooting. Several public eyewitnesses confirmed seeing her going through the walking path at the Warren's Garden at the time of the shooting. Despite the location being very close to where our ballistics specialists guessed the sniper would be, no murder weapon could be found at either the building where the sniper could have been, or Wong's hotel room."

Kash gets closer to Dean to peek into the files, although Dean tries his best to conceal it. "Could Wong be acting alone here, or is the whole firm involved as well?"

"My friend had some ideas, so he tried to break into their office in Manhattan. He got busted before he could get any information and was barred from approaching the firm again. Whether or not the whole firm is involved can only be left to our imagination."

"...Wong's involvement in the whole thing is no imagination. She might have not been able to get any useful information from Gene's dad, so she decided to take him out and search his home herself."

"Gene's dad...?" Dean looks at Brenda, who is also approaching him to steal a glance at the files.

"Martin Oakley was my boyfriend's father. Just a few hours before zombies hordes started attacking our precinct, I was passing by on my way to school when I saw Ka..." Brenda looks at Kash for a moment before she corrects her statement. "I mean, Wong... bolted out of the Gene's house with a gun in her hand screaming like a lunatic. I had a bad feeling, so I rushed into the house to check on him. That's when I saw Gene's bo..."

Brenda breaks down and cries. Kash can see she tries to hold it in by closing her mouth with both her hands, yet the tears kept flowing anyway. "I'm sorry, I... need to calm myself down." She leaves Kash and Dean in a hurry and gets out of the room.

"She... supposedly saw Gene with gunshot wounds. That's what she told me when I first met her, and how she thinks I did it." Kash resumes Brenda's story, despite Dean's sharp glare at her.

Dean takes a deep breath and closes the files. He sits there remaining still for a moment. "To Wong's credit, Brenda didn't see her pulling the trigger."

"What about silencers?"

"There is no such thing as silencers." Dean takes out a cylinderical object from his pocket and mounts them at the end of his Glock's barrel. After drilling it in secure and tight, he fires his gun towards the ceiling once. The noise was not as loud as standard guns, but it was still loud enough to be heard at least 50 feet away. "Hear that? These are called SUPRESSORS. They only lower the noise from a bomb to firecracker, not a leaking tire like you see in the movies."

"...I get it, jesus..." Kash's irritation and frustration with the whole affair are growing. All the wealth of information still has nothing to link her, or anyone in her family, with Wong. Her fists are clenched tight, and she walks away from Dean, trying to contain those feelings. "Still nothing to link me with the whole thing. Why the fuck am I doing this in the first place?"

"The plot sure is thickening, at least." Dean reaches for a black clear folder underneath the pile of documents he left on the table, and opens it. "Gerard Oakley was twice issued a ticket for carrying excess weight on the truck he drove for Carrion Transport and Mailing Services."

"...Wait, my dad's a bus driver."

"Not 9 years ago. In case you're wondering, Carrion is a subsidiary of Umbrella Incorporated."

"Fuck... I never knew."

"According to the records, those were the only offense he ever did. When I checked SpeedStrip's employee records for you father, he started working there just a month after the last ticket offense. Also, Wong was seen once entering a Carrion office a day after the second murder, asking the receptionist about a man named 'John'."

"So she was looking for 'John' in a transport company my dad left 9 years ago. What's that gotta do with him?"

"That excess transport material that gave your father the ticket? Apparently your father repeatedly tried to deal with the office here to make them charge them up to a certain 'John' from Umbrella Incorporated, the guy who supposedly made him mount all the materials on the truck beyond the limit. Don't you think that's something; to know that he quit right afterwards?"

"And for all we know, it could still be pure coincidence. DAMN!" Kash kicks the wall, venting it out. "I can't give a FUCK about Wong and her espionage shit! Why is this happening to me? What the hell did my father do that turned me this way! This is... This is INSANE!"

"Jaeger!" Branagh shows up at the door outside. His uniform has freshly red blood stains on his left shoulder. Looking at him, Kash's heart begins to beat faster. "We need able hands, NOW!"

"What's wrong?"

"A whole army of zombies and freaks are approaching the station from two directions. The freaks are coming in small herds, but the zombies, they have these claws and are getting to us way too quick! We already lost our first and second posts!"

"Crimson heads..." Dean looks at Kash, while Branagh watches on still confused and in panic. "The zombies put down without headshots or decap are coming back to life. Judging by the last time we saw one in action, this shit could get out of hand."

"Hurry up, Dean! You're the best marksman we have right now! Refugees at the tent are already losing control and we'll lose everyone if we don't act NOW!"

"You have two right now, Marvin." Dean immediately gets to the pink crate and takes out all their weapons and ammunition, including Kash's shotgun along with several types of grenades. Kash only stands there feeling nervous, yet annoyed angry at the same time.

"...Shit!"


End file.
